The Rudolf Steiner Archive

This lecture by Rudolf Steiner was given in Stuttgart a few weeks before the first Goetheanum, the building to which he had given loving work as architect, sculptor, and painter, was completely destroyed by fire. In this lecture he speaks of the heritage brought over from the life before birth, and of the quality in the human soul which is a seed for the life after death, the quality of love; and of the power of the arts to make a bridge between the two worlds.
Also known as, Art in its Spiritual Nature, it is number fourteen of sixteen in the lecture series entitled, Spiritual Relationships in the Human Organism. It is contained in Volume No. 218 of the Complete Centenary Edition of Rudolf Steiner's works.

It gives me great satisfaction to be able to speak to you today on passing through Stuttgart, and I should like to make this an opportunity for discussing several things connected with the last two lectures I have been permitted to give here. I spoke then about man's relation to the spiritual world in so far as knowledge of it can be advanced by bringing to light the processes that go on during sleep without our being conscious of them, and by the illumination that spiritual science can throw on the experiences undergone by man in the spiritual world between death and a new birth.

Today I would like to speak of how man's life on earth is in a certain sense a reverse image of those experiences. Human life on earth is understood only when particular expressions of it can be related to their counterparts in the spiritual world, where man spends the major part of his existence.

I would like first to speak of some of the ways in which the human soul expresses itself during earthly life, in so far as they can be related to experiences in the spiritual world. From my last two lectures here you will have gathered that the experiences of the human soul between death and rebirth differ essentially from those between birth and death. Here on earth a man's experiences are all mediated through his body, be it the physical body or the etheric body. Nothing of what he experiences on earth can be experienced without the support of the bodily nature. We might easily imagine, for example, that thinking is a purely spiritual act, and that in the way it comes about on earth in the human soul it has nothing to do with existence in a body. In one sense this is so. But spiritually independent as human thinking is, it could not take its course here in earth existence were it unable to have the support of the body and its processes. I may avail myself of a comparison which I have often used here on similar occasions. When a man is walking, the ground he walks on is certainly not the essential part of his activity; the essential part is inside his skin; but without the support of the ground he could not get along.

It is the same with thinking. In essence, thinking is certainly not a brain-process, but without the support of the brain it could not take its earthly course. In the light of this comparison one gets a right conception of the spirituality as well as of the physical limitations of human thinking In short, my dear friends, here in earthly life there is nothing in man that does not depend on the body for support. Within the body we carry our organs—lung, heart, brain, and so on. In normal health we have no conscious perception of our internal organs. We perceive them only when they are ill, and then in a very imperfect way. We can never say that we have knowledge of an organ by looking directly at it, unless we are studying anatomy, and then we are not studying a living organ. We can never say that we have the same view of an internal organ that we have of an external object. It is characteristic of earthly life that we do not know the interior of our body by means of ordinary consciousness. Least of all does a man know what he generally considers of most value for his bodily existence—the interior of his head. For when he begins to know anything of it, as a rule the knowledge proves most unpleasant—headache and all that goes with it.

In spiritual life between death and a new birth the exact opposite prevails. There we do really know what is within us. It is as if here on earth we were not to see trees and clouds outside, but were to look in the main inside ourselves, saying: Here is the lung, here the heart, here the stomach. In the spiritual world we contemplate our own interior. But what we see is the world of spiritual beings, the world we come to know in our anthroposophical literature as the world of the higher Hierarchies. That is our inner world. And between death and rebirth we feel ourselves actually to be the whole world—when I speak of the whole it is only figuratively, but it is entirely true—at times we each of us feel ourselves to be the whole world. And at the most important moments of our spiritual existence between death and a new birth we feel within us and experience the world of spiritual beings and are conscious of them. It is just as true that we are conscious there of spirits of the higher world within us as it is true that here on earth we have no consciousness of our interior, of liver, lungs, and so on. What is most characteristic is that in spiritual experience all our physical experience is reversed. Gradually, through initiation-knowledge, we learn how this is to be understood.

Now, however, there is an essential process—or group of processes—related to this inward living together with the beings of the higher Hierarchies. Were we in the spiritual world to perceive inwardly only the world of the higher Hierarchies, we would never find ourselves. We would indeed know that various beings were living in us, but we would never become fully aware of ourselves. Hence in our experience between death and a new birth there is a rhythm. It consists in an alternation between our inward contemplation and experience of the world of spiritual beings described in anthroposophical literature, and a damping down of this consciousness. We do the same with the spiritual within us when in physical life we close our eyes and ears and go to sleep. If I may put it like this, we turn our attention from the world of spiritual beings within us and begin to perceive ourselves. Certainly it is as if we were outside ourselves, but we know that this being outside ourselves is what we are. Thus in the spiritual world we alternately perceive ourselves and the world of spiritual beings.

This constantly repeated rhythmical process can be compared with two different things here in physical existence on earth. It can be compared with in-breathing and out-breathing, and also with sleeping and waking. In physical existence on earth both these are rhythmical processes; both may be compared with what I have been describing. But with the processes that take place in the spiritual world between death and rebirth, it is not a question of knowing something in a purely abstract way, or—I might add—for the satisfaction of spiritual curiosity; it is a matter of recognising life on earth as an image of the super-earthly. And the question necessarily arises: What takes place in earthly life that is like a faculty of memory such as man does not have in ordinary consciousness, a faculty that might be possessed by beings of the Hierarchies, Archangels? What is there in physical life that is like a memory of living oneself into the world of spiritual beings, or like a memory of experiencing oneself there?

Now, my dear friends, had we no experience between death and a new birth of looking within ourselves and finding there the world of the spirit, down here on earth there would be no such thing as morals. What we retain of this experience of beings in the spiritual world when we enter life on earth is an inclination towards the moral life. This inclination is strong in proportion to the clearness with which between death and a new birth a man has experienced his living together with the spirits of the higher world. And anyone who in a spiritually right sense sees into these things, knows that immoral men, as a result of their preceding life on earth, had too dull an experience of this spiritual existence. But if between death and a new birth we were able to experience only what makes us one with the beings of the higher world, and were never able to experience ourselves, then on earth it would be impossible for us ever to achieve freedom, consciousness of freedom, consciousness of our personality, which is fundamentally identical with the consciousness of freedom. Thus when on earth we develop morality and freedom, they are memories of the rhythm we experience in the spiritual world between death and a new birth. But by directing our gaze to the soul we can speak more exactly of what echoes on in the soul—the becoming one with spiritual beings on the one hand, and on the other our experience of spiritual consciousness of the self. What during earthly life remains in our soul as an echo of the becoming one with the beings of the spiritual world is the capacity for love. This capacity for love is more deeply connected than people think with the moral life. For without the capacity for love there would be no moral life here on earth; it all arises from the understanding with which we meet the soul of another, and from striving to accomplish what we do out of this understanding. How we behave to others with selflessness, or how in love we can act morally, are essentially echoes from our life between death and rebirth in common with spiritual beings; and this remains with us after our experience of what one might call loneliness—for so it is felt to be—the lonely experience of our self in the spiritual world. For we do then feel lonely when we, as it were, breathe out. In-breathing is like an experience of spiritual beings; out-breathing like an experience of our self. But feeling lonely—well, this feeling lonely has its echo here on earth as our capacity for remembering—our memory. As human beings we should have no memory were it not an echo of what we have described as a feeling of loneliness. We are real individuals in the spiritual world because—I cannot say because we withdraw into ourselves—but because we can liberate ourselves from the higher spirits within us. That makes us independent in the spiritual world. Here on earth we are independent because we are able to remember our experiences. Just think what would become of your independence if in your thoughts you had always to live in the present. Your remembered thoughts are what make it possible for you to have anything of an inner life. Remembering makes us into personalities here on earth. And remembering is the echo of what I have described as the experience of loneliness in the spiritual world.

Now why do we come down at all to the physical out of the spiritual world? You may gather from what I said here last time that the forces holding us together with higher spiritual beings grow weaker. Here in physical life we become old because the forces holding us in connection with the physical earth weaken; over there the forces weaken which hold us in connection with spiritual beings. Above all, those forces weaken that enable us to grasp ourselves within spiritual beings and so to be independent. In the spiritual world, an appreciable time before descending to earth, we lose the capacity for living together with spiritual beings. With the help of spiritual beings we form the spirit-seed of our physical body: this we send down first; then we take up our etheric body and follow after. I pictured this for you in my last lecture. Our capacity for living with spirit-beings in the spiritual world fades out, and we feel how through the forces of the moon we approach ever nearer to the earth. We feel ourselves as a self, but continually become less able to comprehend, to maintain, ourselves within spiritual realms; this capacity becomes increasingly feeble. We have a growing feeling that faintness may overcome us in the spiritual world. This creates in us a need for what we can no longer carry within us, the feeling of self, to be supported by something outside, namely our body—a need to be supported by a body. I might put it thus, that we have gradually to unlearn flying and learn to walk. You understand that I am speaking figuratively, but the picture is in absolute accord with truth, with reality. Thus we find our way into our body. The feeling of loneliness finds a refuge in the body and becomes the faculty of remembering, and we have to win through to a new feeling for community on earth. This proves to be very significant when with the aid of spiritual science we study the state of sleep.

I described this state of sleep from a certain aspect last time I was here. I now want to add something about the processes mentioned then. I know that such things are easily misunderstood. Over and over again one hears that people are saying: “Last time he described man's experience between going to sleep and waking, and now he is telling us something different about it.” My dear friends, if I tell you what an official experiences in his office, it does not contradict what later I tell you about him in the bosom of his family. The two things go together. So you must be clear that when I tell you of experiences between going to sleep and waking this is not the whole story, just as an official can still have a family life outside his office.

Thus man, between going to sleep and waking, actually experiences a kind of backward repetition of what he accomplished in the course of the day. It is not simply that between going to sleep and waking—the sleep can be quite short, and then things are telescoped together—it is not simply that between going to sleep and waking man has a retrospective view of his experiences during the day, an unconscious view, for naturally it must be unconscious—no, when the soul during sleep becomes really clairvoyant, or when the clairvoyant soul looks back in memory on the experiences between going to sleep and waking, it is seen that man really experiences the going backward of what he has experienced since the last time he woke. If he sleeps through the night in an ordinary way, he goes backward through what he has done by day. The last event takes place immediately on going to sleep, and so on. The whole of his sleep works in a wonderfully regulating way. I can but tell you what can be investigated by spiritual science. When you fall asleep for a quarter of an hour, the beginning of the sleep knows when it will end, and in this quarter of an hour you experience in backward order what you have brought about since last you woke. It is all given its right proportion—marvellous as this may seem. And this backward experience may be said to lie somewhere between reality and semblance.

If one has a memory-picture of something experienced in physical life twenty years before, a healthy, thoughtful person will not take it for a present experience; it is in the nature of the memory-picture itself that we relate it to a past experience. Anyone who looks clairvoyantly into what the soul experiences during sleep in backward order does not connect this with the present; he connects it with the future after death. Just as anyone realises that his recollection of something experienced twenty years before refers to that past time, so does anyone who clairvoyantly sees into the state of sleep know that what he sees has no significance for the present but foreshadows what is to be experienced after death, when we have to go backwards through all that we have done on earth. That is why this sleep-picture is half-reality and half-semblance—it is related to the future. Thus for ordinary consciousness it is an unconscious experience of what man has to live through in what I called in my book, Theosophy, the soul world. And the intuitive and inspired consciousness described in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, gathers from the observation of sleep what man has to go through during the first stage after death. These things are not mere fabrications; they are plainly observed once the gift of observation has been acquired. Thus, from going to sleep till waking, man lives without his body through what he has done with his body when awake.

We come now to an extraordinarily subtle concept. Just think how from outside we have to live through our deeds again with our ego and our astral body. The capacity to do so is acquired in proportion to the degree of love we unfold. That is the secret of life where love is concerned. If a man is able really to go out of himself in love, loving his nearest as himself, he learns what he needs in sleep for experiencing in reverse, fully and without pain, what has to be experienced in this way. For then he must be quite outside himself. If a man is a loveless being, a feeling arises when, outside himself, he has to experience the actions he performed without love. This hems him in. Loveless persons sleep as if—to use a metaphor—they were short-winded. So it is that whatever we have been able to implant in ourselves through love becomes truly fruitful while we are asleep. And in what is thus developed between going to sleep and waking, we have something that goes through the gate of death and then lives on further in the spiritual world. It is lost between death and rebirth when we are living together with the spiritual beings of the higher worlds and we recover it as a seed during earthly life through love. For love discloses its meaning when with his ego and astral body a man in sleep is outside his physical body and etheric body. Between going to sleep and waking his essential being widens if he is full of love and prepares himself well for what is to happen to him after death. If he is loveless and is poorly prepared for what is to happen to him after death, his being narrows. The seed for what happens after death lies pre-eminently in the unfolding of love.

During our life on earth between birth and death, our memories are extraordinarily fleeting; only pictures remain. Think how little these pictures retain of the events lived through. Just remind yourself of the unspeakable grief experienced at the death of someone very close to you, and imagine vividly the inner condition of soul attendant upon it, and then observe how this appears as an inner experience when after ten years you call it up. It has become a pale, almost abstract shadow. That is what our capacity for recollection is—pale and abstract compared with the full vigour of immediate life. Why is our recollection thus weak and shadowy? It is indeed the shadow of our experience of self between death and a new birth. Within it is the faculty of remembering, so that it really gives us our existence. That which gives us flesh and blood here on earth, between death and a new birth gives us the faculty of memory. Over there memory is robust and full-blooded—if I may use such expressions for what is spiritual—then it takes on flesh and becomes weak. When we die. for a few days—I have often described this—the last remnant of memory is still present in the etheric body. If when we go through the gate of death we look back over our past life on earth, memory fades out. And out of this memory there unwinds what the force of love on earth has given us as force for life after death. Thus the force of memory is the heritage we receive from our pre-earthly life, and the force of love is the seed for what we have after death. That is the relation between earthly life and the spiritual world.

Now, my dear friends, I have compared what man experiences in connection with higher beings in the spiritual world, alternating with his experience of the self, with breathing—in-breathing, out-breathing. In our breathing process, and in the processes concerned with speech and song, we can recognise an image of “breathing” in the spiritual world. As I have said, our life in the spiritual world between death and a new birth alternates between contemplation of the inner self, and becoming one with the beings of the higher Hierarchies; looking out from within, becoming one with ourself. This goes on like in-breathing and out-breathing. We breathe into ourselves and then breathe ourselves out, and this is of course a spiritual breathing. Here on earth this breathing process becomes memory and love. And in fact memory and love also work together here in physical earth-life as a kind of breathing. And if with the eyes of the soul you are able to look at this physical life rightly, you will be able to observe in an important manifestation of breathing—speaking and singing—the physiological working together of memory and love.

Study the child up to the change of teeth. You will observe how the power of recollection, of memory, gradually unfolds. At first it is quite elementary. The child has a certain memory, but it becomes an independent force only towards the time when the teeth change, and is complete in its development when the child is ripe for school. It is only then that we can begin to build upon memory. Earlier than this, by building too much on memory we make the child rigid and create a sclerotic condition of soul for its later life. When dealing with children before the change of teeth, it is a question of their receiving impressions of the present in the right way. It is between the change of teeth and puberty that we may venture to build upon memory.

Today the science of physiology has not reached the point when it can describe in detail the process just pictured. Spiritual science is capable of this and physiological science will certainly follow suit, for these things can be discovered by a close observation of human nature. One may say: When we give out a sound or a note, to begin with the head is engaged. But from the head comes the same faculty that inwardly, in the soul, gives memory, which plays into sound and tone: this comes from above. For anyone to be able to speak without having a faculty of memory is inconceivable. Were we always to forget what is contained in sound or tone, we should never be able to speak or sing. It is precisely embodied memory that lives in tone or sound, on the one hand; on the other hand, for the part played by love, even in its physiological sense, in the breathing process that gives rise to speaking and singing—for this you have clear witness in the full inner volume of tone that comes to the male with puberty, when love finds physiological expression during the second important period of life: this comes from below. There you have the two elements together—from above what lies at the physiological basis of memory—from below what lies at the physiological basis of love: together they form tone in speech and in song. There you have their reciprocal interplay. In a way it is also a breathing process running through the whole of life. Just as we breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide so, united in us we have the force of memory and the force of love, meeting one another in speech, meeting one another in tone. One can say that speaking and singing in man are an alternating interchange of permeation by the force of memory and by the force of love.

Herein lies something extraordinarily significant for disclosing the real secret of tone and sound.

Thus there is real truth in what is expressed in the more ancient languages by calling the sum of world forces and world thoughts the Logos. That is the other side, the super-physical side of that which comes to physical expression in speech. We do not only breathe in and breathe out higher beings between death and rebirth, but we also speak, though this speaking is at the same time a singing. In the alternation between going out into the spiritual beings and coming back into ourselves, we speak a spiritual speaking—with the beings of the higher Hierarchies. When we are in the state of becoming one with the beings of the spiritual world, we look upon them even though they are within ourselves. When we are free from them again and come to ourselves, then we have the after-effect, then we are ourselves. Over there they express their own being in us: they tell us what they are: the Logos lives in us. On earth this is reversed; in speech and song our own being is expressed. We express our whole being in the process of out-breathing; whereas when between death and rebirth we release the spirit beings, we have received in the Logos the whole being of the world.

But, my dear friends, the fact is that when we pass over from the spiritual world into the physical we go through the great oblivion. Who with ordinary consciousness sees here in the weak, shadowy force of memory the echo of what we were as self in the spiritual world? Who still recognises in speech, in the part that comes from memory, the after-vibration of the self? Who recognises in the plastic forming of speech, in singing and speaking, an echo of beings of the higher Hierarchies? Nevertheless is it not true that whoever understands how to listen to speech without taking the meaning into consideration, whoever can give ear to what the tones express through their very nature, has a feeling—particularly if he is artistically inclined—that more is revealed in speaking and singing than what the ordinary consciousness receives? Why then do we transform ordinary speech that we have here on earth as a utilitarian faculty—why do we transform it into song by divesting it of its utilitarian function and making it express our own being in declamation, in song? Why do we transform it? What are we doing then?

Now we get the right idea of this if we say: Before descending to earth you were in the spiritual world and lived there in the way described. The great oblivion came. In what your mouth utters, in what your soul remembers, in how your soul loves, you do not recognise the echo of what you were in the spiritual world. In art, however, we retreat a few steps from life, as it were, and come a few steps nearer to what we were in our pre-natal life and what we shall be in our life after death. And if we are able to recognise how memory is an echo of what we had in pre-earthly life, and how the unfolding of love is the seed of what we shall have after death, if through spirit-knowledge we picture the past and the future of human existence, in art we call up into the present—as far as this is possible for man within his physical organisation—we call up into the present what unites us to the spirit.

That is the essential glory of art: it takes us by simple means into the spiritual world in the immediate present. Anyone who is able to look into the inner life of man will say: Generally a man remembers only the things he has experienced in the course of his present earthly life. But the force through which he remembers these earthly experiences is the weakened force of his existence as a self in pre-earthly life. And the love that he is able to unfold here as a universal love of humanity is the weakened force of the seed which will come to fruition after death. And as in song and in declamatory speech there must be united what a man is, through memory, with what he can give the world, through love, so it is in all art. A man may experience a harmony of the self with what is outside, but unless he is capable of showing outwardly what is within him—be it in tone, painting or any other branch of art—of showing on the surface what he is, what life has made of him, what is the essential content of his memory, he can be no artist. Neither is he a true artist who in a pronounced way is impelled to be an egotist in his art. Only those who are disposed to open out to the world, who become one with their fellows, who unfold love, can unite this unfolding of love closely with their own being. Altruism and egotism unite in one stream. They flow together naturally and most intimately in the sounding arts, but they flow together also in the plastic arts. And when through a certain deepening of our forces of knowledge there is revealed to us how man is connected with a super-sensible world where past and future are concerned, we can also say that man has a present foretaste of this connection in his creation and enjoyment of art. Actually art never acquires its full value if it is not to some extent in accord with religion. Not that it has to be sanctimonious—even art in a jovial mood can have this accord.

Ample proof of this lies in the way art has developed. Originally it was one with religious life. In primitive ages of mankind it was woven into religious cults. The images men formed of their gods was the source of plastic art. As an instance of this let us recall the Samothracean Mysteries alluded to by Goethe in the second part of his Faust, where he speaks of the Kabiri.¹ In my studio in Dornach I tried to make a picture of these Kabiri. And what came of it? It was something very interesting. I simply set myself the task of puzzling out intuitively how the Kabiri must have appeared in the Samothracean Mysteries. And just imagine this: I arrived at three pitchers, but pitchers, it is true, shaped plastically and in accordance with art. At first I astonished myself, although Goethe actually spoke of pitchers. The matter became clear to me only when I found that these pitchers stood on an altar: then something in the nature of incense was put into them, the sacrificial words were sung, and from the power of the sacrificial words—which in the more ancient times of mankind had a force of vibratory stimulus quite different from anything possible today — the smoke of the incense was formed into the desired image of the divinity. Thus in the ritual you had the accompanying chant immediately expressing itself plastically in the smoke of the incense.

Mankind had truly drawn art from the religious life. And Schiller is right in saying: “Only through the dawn of beauty do you press on into the land of knowledge,” which you generally find quoted in books as “Only through the door of beauty do you press on into the land of knowledge.” If an artist makes a slip of the pen, it gets handed down to posterity. The right reading, of course, is: “Only through the dawn of beauty do you press on into the land of knowledge.” In other words—all knowledge comes through art. Fundamentally, there is no knowledge that is not intimately related to art. It is only the knowledge connected with externals, with usefulness, which appears to have no connection with art. But this knowledge can extend only to what in the world a mere colour-grinder would know of painting. As soon as in chemistry or physics one goes beyond—I am speaking figuratively but you will know what I mean—what mere colour-grinding implies, science becomes art. And when the artistic is grasped in its spiritual nature in the right way, it gradually passes over into the religious. Art, religion and science were formerly one, and we should still have a sense of their common origin. This we can have only when there is a return to the spirit in human civilisation and human development; when we take seriously the relation existing between man here in his physical existence on earth and the spiritual world. This knowledge we ought to make our own from the most varied points of view.

Today I wished to deal with one of these points of view, my dear friends, so that from a certain aspect you may have a picture of how man is connected with the spiritual world. I hope that we shall be able to go on enlarging these studies in a not too distant future.

As published in Golden Blade 1983

• 1. See the lecture-cycle, “Goetheanism as an impulse for man's transformation” Dornach, January 1919.

It gives me great satisfaction to be able to speak to you once again, to be able to speak to you in the branch of our Anthroposophical Society in which I was able to develop the main part of my work for many years. Today I would like to speak to you about a number of things that I believe are important to consider in the present day. I would like to speak to you about the relationship between the human being and the supersensible world.

This is actually the constant theme of our discussions within the anthroposophical movement. But you will already have become accustomed to the fact that the truths about the supersensible worlds can only come into the full possession of the human mind when they are viewed from the most diverse points of view, so that, as I have often said, an overall impression can arise through the assimilation of images from the most diverse sides.

You know that spiritual scientific observation shows that human life on earth falls into two parts that are separated by time: the fully conscious waking state and the sleeping state. They also know that during sleep, those parts of the human being that we call the physical body, the etheric or formative body, the astral body and the ego are separated, so that the human being, so to speak, physical body and his etheric body, and that he initially leads an unconscious existence in his astral body and in his ego-being outside of the physical body and the etheric body. When one ascends to higher knowledge, it is not the case that one gains something for the human being through this ascent itself, through the knowledge, any more than we gain something for our digestion by having theoretical knowledge about this digestion, or at least we gain nothing for the immediate nature of digestion, as it takes place in our normally organized human being. It can be said that higher knowledge brings nothing new into the human being. Everything that higher knowledge provides is already in the human being. But it is the case that what can definitely be said to bring nothing new into the human being points to what remains unknown to the human being for ordinary consciousness and what, by not only is recognized but is experienced with the full content of the soul, with all the soul's powers, it does indeed bring something higher into the human being: not knowledge as such, but the experience of this knowledge.

In saying this, I have indicated what I would like to present as a threefold aspect of anthroposophical endeavour. First of all, there is the fact that there must be individuals who acquire spiritual-scientific methods in such a way that they can bring about knowledge of the supersensible worlds through higher vision in the supersensible worlds. What one calls the acquisition of these cognitions during one's existence on earth is not so important. If one does not associate the nebulous mystical ideas that are very often associated with the term clairvoyance, then one can speak of clairvoyant knowledge. Through this, then, what must increasingly become the purpose in life in our present age comes about.

The second thing is that through the ordinary, as one says, healthy human understanding, if it is only unbiased enough, that which is revealed through clairvoyant knowledge can be understood. I have often emphasized that one does not need to be a clairvoyant oneself to understand what is revealed through clairvoyant research. But it is also important for those who come to clairvoyant insight themselves to translate what they see into ordinary human terms. For that is precisely the significance that the clairvoyant has for man in the present time of his development: that it can be translated into those terms that we have in today's civilization as the terms of man in general. Therefore, whether one is clairvoyant or not, one must understand what is revealed through clairvoyant research.

And the third thing is this: what can be translated from clairvoyant research into concepts, what can be presented from clairvoyant research, must become an inner purpose in life, must become such that the human being thereby understands: I am a being that is not only bound to earthly existence between birth and death, but I am a being for whom earthly existence is only one phase, only one temporary metamorphosis. And everything that can appeal to the human soul will enter the soul if anthroposophy becomes the purpose in life in this sense. Firstly, the human being knows that he belongs to the spiritual worlds and he also knows that his earthly existence must receive its tasks from the spiritual worlds. Secondly, however, the human being knows that he is responsible to the spiritual worlds. All this elevates him above mere earthly existence, but not in such a way that he leaves it in a rapturously mystical way and holds it in low esteem, but rather by drawing his tasks for earthly existence from the supersensible world and thereby influencing the whole character, the whole status of his earthly existence.

This is especially important for our time, that we first learn to listen to what can be said through clairvoyant research; that we then endeavor to understand the content of this research through common sense, and that we make this content our life's work, to illuminate life with tasks, to increase our responsibility in life towards the spiritual worlds. In saying this, I would like to convey the color nuance that I would like to permeate my remarks today. I would like to give you some new information about man's relationship to the supersensible world.

The human being who lives here on earth opens his senses to the physical world. By looking into himself, he perceives his thinking, feeling and willing in a certain way. What he perceives through his senses and makes the content of his soul is what he calls his earthly surroundings. Note that, as earth people in this physical environment, we are actually quite familiar with what we call the outside world, the natural outside world, as far as it lies within our horizon, but that, basically, we are quite unfamiliar with what lies within our own being, even often physically. Man does indeed learn to know his inner organs through an external science, but only when he makes these inner organs external beings on the dissecting table or the like. Man cannot get to know his lungs, his heart and so on through looking inside himself with ordinary knowledge. At most, we learn to feel our inner organs, to perceive them when they are diseased. In a healthy state, man does not really perceive his inner self. He lives in his inner being, it is active in him. But precisely because he lives in it, is in it, is himself in it, he does not perceive it as he perceives the outer world, which is not himself.

This shows us that during our time on earth we focus on the outside world and have a world with content around us, and that when we look inward, we have a general, vague feeling of an ego, of which, if we are honest with ourselves, we have to say: it is very dark and very unclear. And that we can alternate between this looking into our inner selves, in which we experience something quite unclear and dark in our soul, and the experience of the external world, which is concrete in itself, determined and full of content everywhere. We can alternate between the two with our consciousness. This is essentially our experience between birth and death.

Between death and a new birth, the experience is essentially different. Especially in those times of existence between death and a new birth, which can be compared to the middle part of our life on earth, when we are at the height of our physical strength as thirty- or forty-year-olds, just in the time that is the middle part between death and a new birth, it is the opposite of life on earth. There we look into our inner being through a different consciousness that we then have, and by looking into our inner being, we have something so concrete and so full of content as when we look into the outer world here on earth. Only when we look at the external world here on earth do we have the beings of the three or four realms around us, the beings of the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms and of the physical human kingdom. We have them around us in that they present themselves to us as sensory content. When we look into ourselves between death and a new birth in the marked time – that is already the case – then we do not have things of nature in us, but we have a world of entities in us, a world of those entities that we describe as the entities of the higher, of the spiritual hierarchies. Here we have world perception, external perception, perception of things; in the spiritual world we have inner perception, perception of beings. We look into ourselves, but we do not find such organs as we carry in us here on earth; rather, we find the whole world of entities when we can have the right awareness for it. And he who describes these entities of the higher hierarchies actually describes nothing other than the external experience of man between death and new birth. And just as we can turn our gaze back from the external world to ourselves, now, conversely, between death and new birth, we can turn our gaze from within, where we find the beings of the higher hierarchies within us, to the outside world, and there we find ourselves. The external world is actually the internal world there, the internal being is the external being, in the way I have just explained it.

But what we see there as an inner, fully-fledged world of spiritual beings within us is presented to us here, during our earthly existence, in its image, presented to us in such a way that we see the sensual images of those beings that we otherwise perceive within us between death and new birth. However, we do not see the same beings here, but, so to speak, the dwelling places of these beings, and that is - because there are always a number of these beings in common - the world of stars around us. So what do we describe when we speak of the stars, for example of the sun, full of knowledge - not with the knowledge between birth and death that is inherent in ordinary consciousness? The sun presents a certain image to our senses: but what presents itself here as the image of the sun, we experience between death and a new birth as a realm of spiritual beings. We do not see the sun as it is here now, but as a realm of spiritual beings. From our earthly existence, we have something like a memory, which tells us that this realm of spiritual entities corresponds to the sun, as seen from Earth. And it is the same for the other stars. That is, our spiritual consciousness between death and new birth becomes a cosmic consciousness. We are not just here within our own skin; we truly are the whole world. But you must not imagine it spatially. But we are the whole world, we carry the starry sky within us. And it is like this: just as we carry our lungs, our heart, our stomach and so on within us here on earth, so we carry the sun, the moon, Saturn, the other stars within us between death and new birth as our inner organs, but they are spiritual beings. It is their spiritual correlate, their spiritual archetype, that we then carry within us.

If we were always in this state, we would never come to ourselves in the spiritual world; we would always feel at one with the world of the higher hierarchies. But that cannot be. It would be just as if we only wanted to breathe in here on earth and never breathe out. Therefore, our life between death and new birth consists of a rhythmic change: in a life in these higher hierarchies and - in cosmic consciousness - in looking out; that is, there: coming to ourselves. Just as we have inhalation and exhalation here, I could also say waking and sleeping, so we alternate there between experiencing the hierarchical spiritual world and experiencing ourselves, where we are alone in our own soul, where we come to ourselves. This is how the rhythmic change in a person's experience arises between being spread out over the whole of world existence and coming to oneself: Being spread out over the whole of world existence – coming to oneself and so on.

This life between death and new birth within the spiritual world, of which the world of the stars is a physical reflection, is truly no less rich than life on earth. But in earthly life we can only recognize the result – and in a very unclear state – of what we experience between death and new birth. Let us imagine the following: we live here on earth, one of us makes shoes, the other skirts, the third cuts people's hair, the fourth builds locomotives and so on. By doing this here on earth in our physical existence, so-called human culture, civilization, comes about. Now, imagine that all of this civilization, in its manifestations, were to be summarized from time to time in a kind of result in a completely different area, for example on the sun. Let us assume that everything that comes into being here on earth, as I have indicated, would simply produce many copies on the sun. This is in fact the reality of what we do in the context described with the beings of the higher hierarchies between death and new birth: we work there with these beings on the spiritual form of our physical earthly body. And this work that is being done, where the human being between death and new birth works together with the beings of the higher hierarchies to bring about the spirit form of the physical earthly body, this work is truly a richer, a more diverse one than what we here as cultural work in physical existence, even if the physical human body that stands before us does not immediately reveal to us that it is the result of the work of divine beings in connection with man in the time of his existence between death and new birth. But older worldviews knew what they were talking about when they called the human body a “temple of the gods.” For this human body is actually, as little as we pay attention to it with our ordinary consciousness here on earth, the most complicated thing in the universe. And what a single human body is, that is precisely the combined work of innumerable beings, to which we ourselves also belong; for we work on the body with which we clothe ourselves in an earthly incarnation, only we cannot work on it individually for ourselves, but we must work on it in community with innumerable spiritual beings of the most diverse hierarchies.

If we speak from the point of view of earthly life, we are accustomed to calling a germ that which is small at first and then grows large in the physical sense. If we call that which man develops between death and a new birth the spirit germ of the physical body, we must say that this spirit germ is as great as the universe and then, as it passes through the embryonic life of man, becomes 'small' in the physical life. The small human germ contains an image of the great spirit germ, which has been worked out by the human being in connection with the higher beings. So that, by looking into the world that the human being passes through between death and rebirth, we actually see how the microcosm, the human body, is formed in ever new specimens from the tasks of the macrocosm. And that is a more sublime task than all the cultural work that a person does between birth and death. And the life that a human being undergoes by working on the human germ from the universe is a more varied and richer life than the one we spend here on earth, for example, by making shoes, making skirts, teaching children, governing states, and so on. Anyone who wants to understand the world must realize that there is something tremendously exalted in shaping the human body, as it exists here in its physical form, out of the tasks of the universe, and that the experience of this shaping is something tremendous, in terms of sublimity, not comparable to what man accomplishes here, even if he also helps to fabricate the most valuable cultural products of physical life on earth.

Thus man actually stands between death and a new birth in the spiritual world: he has an external world, which is himself; his gaze is directed towards his future life on earth, and in the prospect of this future life on earth lies the fact that he withdraws into himself, that he comes to himself. In the moment when his consciousness is filled with looking at his future life on earth and with looking back at his earlier life on earth, he is with himself. At the moment when he works together with the beings of the higher hierarchies on the task of bringing about the complicated physical body in the spirit-germ, he is, so to speak, outside of himself, but he has become one with the spiritual being, he lives in the spiritual being outside. It is at this highpoint of experience between death and a new birth, which I have called the midnight hour of human existence in one of my Mystery Dramas, that the human being experiences inwardly what he sees here in the image of the fixed starry sky. The firmament of the fixed stars or its representative – as the old worldviews also called it – the zodiac, seen from here, is the physical image of the spiritual world in which the human being lives between death and rebirth, and which he experiences as his inner world.

This continues for some time, and then, as it were, the human being leaves this living, this active, this, from an earthly point of view, sublime direct work with the spirits of the higher hierarchies. And the next thing that is then experienced is the point of view of co-experiencing with those higher beings who are revelations of higher beings. From a certain point in time, the human being knows: Yes, direct participation with the higher beings is no longer there, but the higher beings show themselves to me in an image. Seen from the earthly point of view, one can describe this as follows: the human being finds the transition from the world of the fixed stars to the world of the planets. As man passes through the planetary sphere, moving towards an earthly existence, he no longer feels the life of the higher worlds as his inner life; before, he felt it as his inner life. Here in the physical world, we feel our blood circulation, our breathing and so on, as our inner life; there, in the life between death and a new birth, we feel the life and essence of the higher hierarchies as our inner life. We are in a spiritual reality and we participate. Now, from a certain point in time on, we say to ourselves: Now we no longer participate, now what we used to participate in appears to us as in a picture; before we were in the actuality of the spiritual world, now we are in its revelations. But that means in reality: we have passed from the sphere of the fixed stars to the planetary sphere.

There we have to overcome a certain difficulty first: that is the entry into the sphere of Saturn. Certain spiritual forces radiate from Saturn. When we have passed through death, we first enter the planetary sphere and only then come to the sphere of the fixed stars; because then we take the path that I have just described, in reverse order. So when we leave our earthly life through death, Saturn is the dwelling place of those entities that do not want to leave us on earth, that want to lift us up from the earth, want to free us from our earthly powers and want to transport us into the world of pure spirituality. In my Theosophy, I have described this experience from a different point of view than the transition from the life in the soul's realm to the spirit world. These two descriptions are related to each other in the same way that you can always photograph a tree from different sides: it is always the same, but it always looks different. So, on our return journey, towards a new life on earth, we have the influence of the Saturn beings. And those people who, through their previous life on earth, have such karma that when they return to a new life on earth the forces of Saturn have a great influence on them, easily become alienated from the earth; people who either enthuse about how earthly things are actually worthless and how one should flee into a conceptual cloud-cuckoo-land, or people who, because they only looked at human conditions superficially, develop an inclination to organize spiritualistic séances and the like, in which the most diverse spiritual entities can cavort. All this is caused by the fact that in a previous life on earth a person had acquired such karma that, on returning to the terrestrial sphere, he comes into a stronger relationship with the forces of Saturn.

But when man enters the planetary sphere and approaches the solar sphere, he also comes under the influence of the counterpart of the Saturn forces, that is, those spiritual entities that have their dwelling place in the moon. These beings have above all the task of guiding the human being back into earthly existence, so that the person who absorbs the effects of the moon's forces is indeed firmly rooted in earthly existence , although on the other hand it may of course be the lunar forces that permeate the human being all too strongly with the purely physical existence, that is to say with the preference, with the inclination for this purely physical existence.

So we can say: Here on earth we walk among trees, flowers, grasses, animals and so on, between death and a new birth we walk under stars. And it is not so unreal if you simply imagine in a comprehensive picture that you are here on earth during your life on earth, that after death you pass through the spheres of the planets, leaving the lunar sphere, losing your inclination for earthly life, being transported out through Saturn, spheres, and then return again, enter the planetary sphere, and in particular, by coming under the influence of the moon, you will be prompted to return to earthly life in the supersensible world by what the lunar forces are. It urges you to return to earthly life. Just as we are connected here on earth with what we call our sensory environment, so we are also connected with this life through the world of the stars. And all this has great significance for our work with the beings of the higher hierarchies on the spirit germ of the physical human body. For until we descend to the planetary sphere for a new life on earth, it even remains undecided in our being, which we are building for our future life on earth, whether we will become man or woman. Yes, it even remains undecided for a certain time when we are already in the planetary sphere as soul-spiritual beings. In the sphere of the fixed stars, to speak of anything similar to what we have here as man and woman would be pure nonsense. But in the picture I have now begun to paint, you can well imagine that as you move away from the earth, you first see the moon from the front, then from behind. You also see Venus, Mercury and the Sun from behind, then you see the zodiac sphere and so on. But as you pass through these spheres, what is otherwise a physical image for us here is transformed into a sum of spiritual entities that you look at. When you look at the moon from behind, you see spiritual beings, for example those spiritual beings that were of particular interest to the initiates of the Old Testament: the presence of Yahweh and the beings that belong to it. But if you now return to Earth, you can, through your past karma, approach the lunar sphere by choosing the point in time when, as seen from Earth, there is a full moon in the sky; that is, you see, as seen from Earth, a full moon, the illuminated disc of the moon, but as seen from behind, when approaching Earth, the moon looks black. Choose the time for your approach to Earth so that you are influenced by the black sphere of the moon, unaffected by the sun, when there is a full moon on Earth. If, on the other hand, you choose a time when we do not see the moon here on earth, when there is a new moon and the effects of the sun go out freely into space in all directions, then you will establish a male earthly existence. So you see, we have to derive what we are here on earth in the physical body from the experiences that we have in the stellar sphere, that is, in the spiritual sphere, as it were, from the other side, between death and new birth. These things can be traced in great detail. Just as we on earth can say what a person experiences by eating cabbage or eggs or ox meat, for example, because his physical existence on earth depends on it, so too are there corresponding relationships in the spiritual worlds, the result of which then appears in the formation and inner experience of the person on earth. Here on earth we eat ox meat or eggs; in the spiritual world, between death and a new birth, we choose, according to our karma, the new moon or full moon for the time of our transition and thus become man or woman. But the full human existence in connection with the existence of the world can only be grasped if we do not merely consider what happens here between birth and death, but if we can understand what happens in earthly life in connection with what happens between death and a new birth for man.

This is something that man today does not yet understand in its full, real significance for earthly life either. But man today actually only knows the world as a mole knows museums. The mole that digs through the soil under the museums can perhaps list its experiences about it; but there will not be much of what is above him. This is more or less the position of the world as far as the earth sciences can reveal it. The only difference is that the mole could live without a museum above it. It has little connection with the museum, but man is intimately connected with the supersensible world, with that by which he is connected. Humanity must regain an awareness of this. Once there was a dim, muffled awareness of these things, which was illuminated in the ancient mysteries, but also with the old methods. These ancient mysteries were not merely one-sided cultic places. It is only in recent times that humanity has had a need for one-sided cultic places. Modern humanity must practise separate cults because it has become egotistical and wants to have an assurance of immortality for its own self. This can be given, it is a fact. But today man is inclined to practise all this separately from one another. In Paracelsus' time it was not yet so, there healing was still divine service. We must - although we must have transitions - come again to see all earthly work as a completion of spiritual work. It is only incumbent upon man today, as it were, to go through earthly events cut off from the spiritual world during his earthly existence; otherwise he would not be able to gain his consciousness of freedom. But the time is fulfilled in which man may keep himself cut off from spiritual existence. He must again permeate his consciousness with inner enlightenment from spiritual existence, and for this he cannot use the old methods today. He must go through what can be revealed to him in this direction in the present.

For suppose that some ancient mystery center provided for the affairs of the surrounding area. The care of this mystery center extended to all the affairs of the people who lived around it, to all those affairs that could only be fulfilled and ordered through the connection of earthly life with the spiritual world. Suppose a person fell ill. In those ancient times, people did not ask: What substances have we tried that have had an effect on humans in this or that direction? — They least of all asked themselves about the effect of substances that they had tried out on animals and so on. Today, people have to go through all of this. This is not meant as a derogatory criticism of medicine, but only as a way of putting it in its proper place in the development of the earth and of humanity. But in ancient times, a sick person who was afflicted with something sought refuge in the mystery temples, for the priests were also artists and doctors. Art, religion and science were one; this was cultivated in the mysteries. In those ancient times, there was still an overall view of man. It was known that when a person is afflicted by something at a certain age, it is not only related to the chemical mixture or separation of his substances, but from a higher point of view, it is related to the experiences and adventures he has undergone when he was in the world of the stars and sought his earthly existence from there.

Let us assume, then, that such a sick person came, between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one, seeking help at a mystery center that was also a medical center. In ancient times, when only instinctive, half-dreamlike knowledge was at work in the mystery centers, when such a sick person came for treatment, the examination that was carried out with him was often nevertheless clearer than today's examinations. I have actually met physicians who, when you entered into conversation with them about the most important thing about the patient and asked, “How old is the patient?” did not know. As if one could possibly contribute to any person's health if one does not have an exact idea of his age! Because in each year of life, man must, so to speak, be cured differently, because human life is constantly changing. No one would think of taking a flower petal, for example, and planting it in the ground, and believing that a new plant would grow from it. Instead, he would take the seed from the fruit and plant it in the ground, because he knows that the development of the plant is something. And so human life must also be considered. If a sick person seeking help came to a mystery doctor between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one – these are approximate figures – the doctor knew that there are a number of illnesses that are simply related to the human being's passage through the solar sphere as he descends from the planetary world into the physical world. If the patient was between the ages of thirty-five and forty-two, the mystery priest knew which diseases had something to do with the passage of man through the sphere of Saturn in his descent. So he asked himself above all about the connection of earthly life with the experiences and adventures of man in existence between death and new birth: then he knew what is here on earth again related to the beings of the higher hierarchies, or rather their physical images, the stars. Now, certain plants on Earth have a more intimate relationship with the Sun than others, and others in turn have a more intimate relationship with Saturn and so on. You will be able to tell by healthy instinct that the sprouting flowering plants, for example, have a different relationship to the Sun than a fungus or lichen on a tree. And someone who, for example, suffers from a stomach or heart condition between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one will certainly not be cured with buckthorn tea, as the ancient mystery doctor would not have treated him with buckthorn tea, but with a sun-related plant juice; but this is based on the knowledge of the connection between human life and the universe.

These things are, so to speak, “buried” knowledge; they must be rediscovered at a higher level, illuminated by our modern intelligence, after humanity has passed through darkness for a period of time. They must be rediscovered and they can be rediscovered, and the anthroposophical world view is the beginning of this rediscovery of spiritual enlightenment for humanity in all areas of life.

I have now described this descent of the human being until he enters the planetary sphere. Then there comes a time, after the influence of the moon has already begun, when the human being loses the spirit germ of his physical body, which has already shrunk very much. The expressions are of course rough, but you will not misunderstand them. This spirit-germ of the physical body descends earlier than the human being himself. It is handed over to a pair of fallopian tubes, sinks into a fertilized human germ, and forms the element of growth there before the human being himself has descended. So there comes a time when the human being has already handed over this physical germ to earthly life, when he looks down on the earth, as it were: This is what he will become, the person to whom I will belong. But for a short time the human being still lives freely in the cosmos. Then the human being draws the forces for his etheric body from the ethereal world of the cosmos, so that he then consists of I-being, astral body and etheric body. And after he has acquired his etheric body in this way, he now unites with what has become his physical germ, which he himself first sent down.

There is an enormous amount of wisdom in this sending forward of the physical human germ and in the subsequent agglomeration, if I may call it that, of the etheric body. For suppose we kept our physical body while we collect the etheric body, and the physical body would not be permeated with physical matter, but rather the forces that could be permeated with physical matter in the womb, but suppose we did not send it ahead, but still permeate it with the etheric body before we arrived in the substance of the physical embryo and in what is offered to us there. What would happen then? Precisely because we can know what might happen, we begin to marvel at the wisdom-filled guidance of the universe. For if it were otherwise, every thought we conceive and every inclination we have for evil would constantly stand before us. There would be, as it were, a living memory of what we had done, even as the slightest evil, only in thought or in feeling on earth. We would be overrun by the contents of conscience, especially from its evil side, and we would not be able to form a neutral thought, we would not be able to come to any knowledge of nature, for example. If we were to look at plants neutrally, according to natural laws, then such thoughts would easily mix into our observation of nature: “Oh, what a bad guy you were at seventeen, what you did then!” This would become ingrained in our observation of nature, and we would never arrive at a neutral view. We are able to distinguish our simple, neutral reflection from our own moral or immoral instincts because we first send down our physical spirit germ and only then, after we have gathered the etheric body, do we connect with the physical body. In this way we keep these two so far apart that the memory can be stored in the physical body, so that it is not always there, and also leaves us free, so that not our whole, namely moral life, is always before us.

I have now described man's descent from the spiritual world to the moment when he unites with the physical substance of the earth in order to continue living on earth. What do we find out now that we have arrived here? I already said that it turns out that we have to say: When I realize that man first sends down the forces that shape his physical body and then follows, I am led to unreservedly admire the wise guidance of world affairs. If I grasp this with all my being, I cannot stand there like a blockhead who makes a machine and does not need to admire it, because I would have to be a very dry person who is revealed such tremendous wisdom of world leadership and does not have admiration for this wisdom welling up within him! And so it is with all anthroposophical insights.

In other words, the ordinary earthly knowledge that we acquire in our waking hours appeals to our intellect, but less so to our feelings. This is not the case with the knowledge that we receive from the spiritual world in our inner experience. They engage our whole being; indeed, our whole nature is organized differently when we acquire these insights. Spiritual knowledge does not want to leave us cold in our minds, as physical knowledge does, but it is no less objective knowledge. If someone were to say, for example, that knowledge that touches the mind is not objective, that it is subjective, then one need only imagine the following: If someone stands before Raphael's Sistine Madonna, then he would have to be a strange fellow if he did not feel admiration for this painting; but no one would be able to say: That is merely subjective, Raphael's Madonna is not objective. For it is not a matter of our not actively feeling forces of sympathy or antipathy in our minds when we look at something objective, but rather of not disturbing the objective through our subjectivity. Of course, if we recognize something because it suits us to take something objectively, then we are not objective, since in this case we assume something because we like it. But if something were to appear before us as objectively as such insights, and we were then to burst into admiration at it, then this admiration would certainly not impair the objectivity of the insight. That is the essential thing about anthroposophical spiritual-scientific insights: they engage not only our intellect, our head, but our whole being. And the more and more we learn about such truths that relate to the life of man between death and new birth, the more our emotional life sprouts and later our life of will. That is, the human being permeates the impulses for his deeds with what he recognizes from the spiritual worlds. He feels here on earth as a fulfiller of what he was in the spiritual life between death and new birth.

Thus, everything that comes from experienced anthroposophy has the power to fulfill the whole person of its own accord, just as the instinctive clairvoyance, that is, the instinctive connection with the spiritual world, was once present in ancient humanity through the whole person. How did we become such intellectual guys today, and why were the ancient people not? Because the ancient people also knew what the instructions from the whole human being were. Today, for example, people learn geometry; they are taught what a perpendicular is. But what a perpendicular is hovers only in the realm of ideas. You can't even say it hovers in the air; it hovers in the realm of ideas, and the connection is simply not known. Man would never have developed a feeling for the vertical if in the course of his life he had not himself become upright and thus felt in his movements what the vertical is. And what the human being experiences in this way is also experienced by his head and made into the vertical. In the same way, what a person experiences when spreading out his arms becomes an experience of the horizontal. Man, who originally was active in his soul life as a whole human being, has gradually limited himself to the head, which can only depict everything figuratively. And how does the head do it in man? Yes, when I walk, I live differently than when I drive in a car: the car goes, and I am quiet. And so it is with the head in man: it is lazy, it has its vehicle in the rest of my organism and lets itself be driven, everything comes to rest, just as when I sit in a train. Therefore everything becomes pictorial, abstract. In the course of our earthly existence, we have come to this abstractness. But we must come again to that which allows us to grasp the spiritual in existence. And this then takes hold of the whole human being. It is the reverse process of what happened with the old man, but through this reverse process we can come again to the study of the whole human being. In this way we then also come again to a culture that fulfills the whole human being.

There are people today who hear what spiritual science has to offer and then say: There are some strange people who are proclaiming a spiritual truth today and think it is necessary for humanity. We do not want to doubt that it may be true that these worlds all exist, as the spiritual scientists talk about them; but what do they have to do with us? We can just wait until we die, then we will see what it is all about. Why should we strain here to understand what it is like in the spiritual world? But it is not like that. It is actually like this: if you want to understand what spiritual knowledge means – that is, the kind of knowledge that can be acquired through common sense after a spiritual researcher has communicated with a person – then the best way to learn about it is to have a spiritual researcher explain how the first step of extrasensory knowledge, imaginative knowledge, is acquired. I will give a few examples of this.

As man usually lives, he has only a consciousness of the present. He has this consciousness through his physical body. It is in space. Space represents the present with its three dimensions. Man therefore always has only a consciousness of the present. And when he has a memory, it is a memory of the present; he does not live himself into what he experienced ten years ago, for instance, but only into the image of what he experienced at that time. This is therefore sufficiently shadowy and abstract. If one seriously practices the exercises I have described in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds” for the purpose of attaining imaginative knowledge, one comes to not only live in the present, but gradually to overcome the shadowy of memory and to live in one's own past experiences. In this way, in 1922, one can still relive one's experiences from 1911 as one experienced them in 1911. And anyone who makes a special effort to live in thoughts, not in abstractions but in a fully concrete way, will be able to grasp how the life of thoughts brings turns of fate and all sorts of , deep sympathy and antipathy, as otherwise only the rough material earth-squeezing - that also comes to experience his time body, as he experiences his space body at all through the ordinary consciousness. If, for example, I cut my big toe, it hurts, and I have not only a memory of this pain in my head, because the head is far removed from the big toe, but I have an immediately experienced sensation of pain. Of course, the head is spatially connected to the big toe, but one does not experience time in this way. When a thirty-year-old person thinks back to what they experienced as a seventeen-year-old, and has now distanced themselves from in terms of time, it seems faded. If you lost a loved one thirteen years ago, how powerful the experience of pain was at the time compared to the present memory. But anyone who, through the exercises described in “How to Know Higher Worlds,” has attained this imaginative knowledge, so that he understands how to live in thought, namely, to live in pure thoughts free of sensuality, as I have described in “Philosophy of Freedom,” lives then, as he lives here in the space body in every part, so there in every part of his time body simultaneously and in every strength. When you place yourself back in time as a fifty- or sixty-year-old person, or even as an eighty-year-old, you see not only five years back — for the present existence extends over the entire course of life —: you are immediately present in every single point. However, this presence is bought at the price of fleetingness. If you are able to have an experience in the most vivid way in your eighteenth year, it does not fade from your mind as quickly as a “dream, but you cannot hold on to it, you have to forget it. And as a spiritual researcher, for example, if there were no other aids, you could get into a very bad situation. You could establish the connections through which you can see something in the etheric world, but you immediately forget it. Therefore, you also have to resort to all kinds of aids - I have given details about this in 'How to Obtain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds' - so that what you acquire in this way as a spiritual-etheric vision does not immediately disappear again. It disappears with great certainty after a few days, and what the person still carries with him as his etheric body after death disappears just as quickly.

One gets to know the whole nature of the etheric from this experience, as I have described it. The things that are told about life after death are not constructed, but gained from a living realization. But if you want to apply such aids, mere mental activity is never enough. I am not afraid to talk about my own experiences when I noticed how fleeting such experiences are in the etheric cosmos. If you see so much, you take recourse to something else to tell your experiences to other people a week later. But these aids are not taken from the mind remedies. One remedy that was very effective was to write down the experience while it was still fresh in my mind, so that the activity was not carried out through the mind but through the writing hand. In this case it is not a matter of mediumistic writing, nor of the purpose of having written it down. Writing things down, even rewriting lectures, is something that is extremely unappealing to someone who works in the spiritual field anyway. But it helps to fix what would otherwise be fleeting by allowing the whole organism to participate, as one would when executing a drawing or a painting. It then remains in one's own organism, one does not need to appropriate it again afterwards. It is only a matter of fixing the things. But for this you cannot use head-aids. If you are a spiritual researcher, you cannot fix it by means of any head-aids; you have to fix it by something that takes up your whole being. One such means would be to write down what you have experienced. But do not take into account that you are incorporating an intellectual activity, but only the characteristic style of the writing; or you can even make a symbolic drawing, a painting, or the like.

From this you can see how intimately connected with the whole human being it is, what must be there, so that one can lead over into the ordinary conceptions, what one sees in the spiritual world. But when one leads it over, then one can communicate it to other people who cannot see spiritually themselves and who then, with their ordinary, healthy human understanding, grasp it through the same conceptions in which one transmits it to them. They then have the same ideas about what the clairvoyant presents to them. To discover spiritual truths, one needs the art of clairvoyance; to live with these truths, one does not need this art of clairvoyance, but only a healthy understanding of what is presented.

But you can see something else from what is presented here. What man is spiritually in his etheric body does not live in space, it lives in time. Now look at the physical organism, for example the eye: with it you see visible things. If you were to tear out your eye, you would no longer be able to see visible things. If you look at the spiritual human being, he is, so to speak, the whole stream that passes from life to life, living once in existence between death and a new birth, then in physical life on earth, then again in life between death and a new birth, and so on. That is a unity. People in ancient times were endowed with instinctive clairvoyance at birth, that is, a connection with the spiritual world through the forces of nature themselves, and this developed in them in such a way that they could take it with them again through death; but the knowledge of the spiritual was not allowed to cease. Nor must it disappear in the newer man. Man must acquire this knowledge of the spiritual here on earth, for he is a continuous stream on earth. If you have had an earthly life that knew nothing at all about the spiritual, then for your spiritual life it is as if you were to pluck out the eye of your physical body. For what you acquire here on earth as knowledge of the spiritual life belongs to you, it is your eye with which you later “see” between death and a new birth. And if you remain “dark” here on earth with regard to knowledge of the spiritual life, then after death you have no eye; then you walk in life between death and a new birth as if through a dark valley. For this eye you must have through what you have acquired here. You tear out the eye of the spirit by excluding knowledge of the spiritual world.

This is a realization that humanity must come to terms with. Now that the old instinctive vision of the spiritual has completely faded away, humanity must realize that organs for the spiritual life must be acquired again along the lines of the path pursued by the anthroposophical movement. It is not a matter of saying: We will wait until after death, we do not need to make an effort now to understand the spiritual worlds, because after death we will see what it is like in the spiritual worlds. Certainly, we will see it after death. But for the soul it will be like a dark dungeon if we have not opened our eyes to life in the spiritual worlds here during our life between birth and death. Therefore you can see how impossible it is when a person virtually sets up a dogma that he need not concern himself with the transcendental existence here in earthly life. For we live rather in a time when, in the true sense of the word, the one who says to himself: Here, in life between birth and death, you must acquire the eye so that it is not dark for you in the spiritual world after death, and so that you can also experience the light that is around you, is also fulfilling his supersensible duty towards the world.

When I was able to speak here in this circle some time ago, I presented man in his relationship to the spiritual world from a certain point of view and concluded by saying: It can be seen from all this how we have arrived at the point in the present age where a core of people must form who recognize the necessity of spiritual-scientific knowledge. From what I have said again today, one can see this necessity even more clearly. We live today in an age in which the spiritual world wants to show itself to us during our earthly lives. We must not close the doors and windows through which it can enter. We must let the light of the spiritual world come in, we must let it come in for the sake of life on earth, we must let it come in for the sake of the life we live between death and a new birth. Man must hear the voices that speak to man from the spiritual world in a spiritual way, and he must say to himself: It is time that man perceived the light of the spirit, that he heard the voice of the spirit. And when we have familiarized ourselves with what can be understood in this way from a spiritual-scientific point of view as the necessities of the time, then the right attitude prevails in such a working space, when one regards oneself as obliged to lead humanity to recognize that now is the time to see the light of the spirit, to hear and understand the voice of the spirit.

It is in this thought, in particular in this feeling and primarily in this attitude that we want to be together and stick together in the times when we are spatially separated again. That is what I would like to say to you as a greeting, a greeting to the effect: Let what we can say to each other when fate brings us together be the occasion for it to prevail as a thought among us, as a sense of belonging together that is there in the spiritual, even when we cannot be together in space! Nevertheless, I hope that it will soon be possible for me to speak to you in person about the continuation of what I have presented today.

Once before I spoke to you of certain spiritual facts concerning the relation of man to the super-sensible worlds—or, as I might equally well express it, the relation of man's earthly life to his life between death and a new birth. For seen from a human point of view man's life between birth and death—interwoven as it is with the physical world of sense—may be held in the main to represent this physical world itself. While the life of man between death and a new birth, when he is altogether interwoven within the super-sensible or spiritual world, represents—seen from a human standpoint once more—the super-sensible world as such.

Today we will continue this line of thought for certain other facts and conclusions of great importance to human life.

Through anthroposophical Spiritual Science we become aware, above all, that man as he stands before himself in the physical world represents—within this physical world—a true image of the Supersensible. Consider on the other hand a mineral object. We cannot say that, such as it is, it is an immediate image of the Supersensible. As to what the mineral nature is, you may read of this in my Theosophy. Of man, however, we must say that in many respects he cannot be understood at all on the basis of what we see around us in the world of the physical senses. On this basis we can understand why, for example, salt assumes a cubical form. True, these things are not yet entirely clear to science today, but from what is already clear it can be said that a crystal of common salt is intelligible on the foundation of what can be ascertained directly in the realm of the sense-perceptible. A human eye or ear on the other hand are not intelligible on the basis of what the physical senses can perceive. Nor can they arise within this domain. The form of the eye or of the ear—both the inward form and the outer configuration—this is a thing that man brings with him as a plan or tendency through birth. Nor does he even receive it through the forces that work, say, in the process of fertilisation or in the body of the mother.

True, it is customary to force all these things which are not understood under the general title of heredity; but in so doing we do but give ourselves up to an illusion. For the truth is that the inner form of the eye or of the ear is already planned and laid out as it were in advance. It is built up in the Spirit, in the pre-earthly life of man, in communion with higher spiritual Beings, with the sublime Beings of the Hierarchies. To a very large extent, man between death and a new birth builds up his own physical body in a spirit-form—as it were a spiritual seed or germ. This Spirit seed, having contracted it sufficiently (if we may use this image), he then sends down into the line of physical inheritance. The Spiritual is thus filled with physical, sense-perceptible material, and so becomes the physical seed, perceptible within the world of sense. But the whole form—the inner form for instance of an eye, or of an ear—is formed and moulded by the work man does between death and a new birth in co-operation with super-sensible, spiritual Beings. Therefore, we may say: Observe a human eye! We cannot assert that it is intelligible like the salt crystal, on the basis of what we see around us with our senses; nor can we say this of the human ear. Rather must we say: To understand a human eye or human ear we must have recourse to those Mysteries which are only to be discovered in the super-sensible world. We must realise that a human ear, for example, is formed and created out of the super-sensible world; and only after it has thus been formed can it undertake its task as a sense-organ—the task of physically hearing the sounds and notes within the atmosphere, within the sphere of Earth. In these respects, we may truly say, man is an image of processes and realities of Being in the spiritual worlds.

Let us consider such a thing in detail. Observe the inner formation of the human ear. Passing inward through the auditory canal you come to the so-called tympanum or drum. Behind this you find a number of minute bones, or ossicles. External science calls them ‘hammer’, ‘anvil’ and ‘stirrup’ (malleus, incus, stapes). Behind these again, you come to the inner ear, of the configuration of which I shall not speak in detail.

The names of these minute ossicles immediately behind the drum—the names, that is to say, which external science gives them—already show that this science is quite unaware of what they really are. For this is how it appears when illuminated with anthroposophical spiritual science. Passing now from within outward, that which adjoins the inward portion of the inner ear, and which science calls the stapes or stirrup, appears in the light of spiritual science as a metamorphosis of a human thigh-bone with its attachment to the hip. And the little bone which science calls the incus or anvil, appears as a transformed knee-cap. Finally, that which passes from the incus to the tympanum or drum appears as a metamorphosis of the lower part of the leg including the foot. But the ‘foot’ in this case rests not on the earthly ground but on the drum of the ear. Within your ear you actually have a human member—a transformed metamorphosed limb. You might also describe it thus: First, the upper arm (only that in the arm the ‘knee-cap’ is undeveloped, that is to say there is no anvil), and then the lower arm—the other ossicle which rests upon the drum. Just as you touch and feel the ground with your feet, so do you touch and feel the drum of the ear with the foot of this little ossicle. Only the foot with which you walk about is coarsely formed. Coarsely you feel the ground with the sole of your foot, while with this hand or foot which is there within your ear you constantly touch and feel the delicate vibration of the drum.

Let us now go farther back, within the ear. We come to the so-called cochlea or ‘snail-shell’. It is filled with a watery fluid, which is necessary for the act of hearing. What the ‘foot’ touches and feels upon the drum has to be transmitted back to this spiral cochlea, situated within the cavity of the ear. And now once more: Above the thigh we have the inner organs, the abdominal organs. The cochlea within the ear is none other than a beautiful, elaborate metamorphosis of these inner organs. And so you can imagine, there inside the ear there lies a human being, whose head is immersed in your own brain. Indeed, we bear within us a whole number of ‘human beings’, more or less metamorphosed or transformed, and this is one of them.

What does all this signify? If you study the origin and growth of man not only with the crude science of the senses; if you are aware that this human embryo as it develops in the mother's womb is the image of what went before it in the pre-earthly life; then you will also realise the following. In the first stages of development in embryonic life, it is above all the head that is planned and formed. The other organs are comparatively small appendages. Now—if it only depended on the inner potentialities inherent in the germ, within the mother's womb—these appendages, these little stumps which afterwards become the legs and feet, could equally become a kind of ear. They actually have the inner tendency, the potentiality to become an ear. That is to say, man might grow in such a way as to have an ear not only here, and here, but an ear downward too. I admit, this is a strange saying. Nevertheless, it is the truth. Man might become an ear downward too. Why does he not? Because at a certain stage of embryonic development he already comes into the domain of the earthly force of gravity. Gravity which causes the stone to fall to Earth—gravity, implying weight—weighs upon that which tends to become the ear, transforms it and re-shapes it. And so it becomes the lower man in his entirety. Under the influence of earthly gravity, the ‘ear’ which tends to grow downward is changed into the lower man. Why then does not the ear itself change in this way? Why do not its ossicles change into fine small legs right and left? For the simple reason that through the whole position of the human embryo in the mother body, the ear is protected from entering into the domain of gravity, as happens with the little embryonic stumps that afterwards become the legs. The embryonic ear does not enter the domain of gravity. Hence it preserves the plan and tendency which it received in the spiritual world in the pre-earthly life. It is in fact a pure image of the spiritual worlds. Now what is there in the spiritual worlds? I have often spoken of it. The music of the spheres is a reality. As soon as we come into the spiritual world which lies beyond the soul-world, we are in a world which lives altogether in sound and song, in melody and harmony, and harmonies of spoken sound. Out of these inner relationships of sound the human ear is formed. Hence we may say that in our ear we have an actual recollection of our spiritual and pre-earthly existence. In our lower human organisation we have forgotten the pre-earthly life; we have adapted our organism to the earthly force of gravity and to all that comes from the principle of weight. Thus if we rightly understand how the form of man comes into being, we can always tell, of any system of organs, how its configuration reveals either its adaptation to the Earth or its continued adaptation to the pre-earthly life.

And now remember: even after we are born, we still continue what was planned and begun in the embryonic life. To walk upright, to enter fully into the forces of gravity, is a thing we only learn to do after our birth. Only then do we learn to orientate ourselves into the three dimensions of space. But the ear tears itself free from the three dimensions of space and preserves its membership of the spiritual world. We human beings are altogether formed in this way. Partly we are a living monument to what we did in unison with higher Beings between death and a new birth; while on the other hand we also bear witness to the fact that we have incorporated ourselves into this Earth existence, wherein the forces of gravity and weight hold sway.

These transformations, however, not only take their course in the direction I have described, but in the opposite direction too. With your legs you walk about on Earth. And—if you will forgive my saying so—you either walk to good deeds or to bad; to better or to worse. Now as to the movements of your legs, on Earth, to begin with, it is no doubt a matter of indifference whether you walk to good deeds or to bad. But true as it is that the lower man is metamorphosed from the plan of an ear into that form wherewith he stands upon the Earth, it is also true that the moral effects which are brought about by your walking—whether you go out to do good deeds or bad—are all transformed after you pass through the gate of Death—not immediately but after a certain time—transformed into the sounds as of a heavenly speech and music.

Assume for instance that a man went out to do an evil deed. On Earth we can at most describe and register precisely how his legs were moving. But the evil deed clings to the movements of the legs when he passes through the gate of Death. Then, when he has laid aside his physical body and his etheric body, all that lay inherent in these movements of the legs is transformed into a harsh discord in the spiritual world. And the whole of the lower man is now transformed again into a head-organisation. The way you move here upon Earth—taking always the moral colouring, the moral quality of it—this is transformed into a head-system after your death. And with these ears you hear how you behaved morally down in this earthly world. Your morality becomes a beautiful, your immorality an ugly music. And the harmonious and dissonant sounds become the Words, uttered as it were by the Hierarchies, the judges of your deeds, whose Words you hear.

Thus you can see in the form of man himself, how the transformation from the Spiritual world into the world of sense, and from this world back again into the Spiritual, takes place by metamorphosis and metamorphoses again. Your head-system is exhausted in the present earthly incarnation. Here the head-system lives and thrives, in order to perceive the Spiritual within the realms of sense. But after death the head falls away. And the rest of the human being, with the exception of the head, is transformed again after death into a head-organisation in the Spirit, to become an actual head once more in the next earthly life. Thus the fact of repeated earthly lives is expressed in the very form and figure of man. No-one understands the human head, who does not regard it as the transformation of a human body—the body of the last earthly life. No-one understands the present body who does not see in it the germ of a head, for the next earthly life. To understand man fully, all that we perceive about him with our senses needs to be penetrated with ideas about the Supersensible.

We may adduce many another concrete fact in this direction. Last time I spoke to you here, I told you how man between death and a new birth experiences a condition wherein he becomes altogether one in his inner being with the Beings of the Hierarchies. He actually forgets himself, he is the Hierarchies himself. Nor would he ever become aware of himself unless he were able, in turn, to extinguish this feeling of the Hierarchies within him. Then, as it were, he goes out of himself, but it is just in so doing that he finds himself. Here upon Earth we find ourselves by looking away from the outer world and concentrating upon our inner being. Between death and a new birth we find ourselves by looking away from what is within us—that is to say, from the Hierarchies within us. In this way we become aware of ourselves.

Now the forces which remain to us from this ‘becoming aware of ourselves’ are none other than the forces of Memory, while the forces which remain to us from our union with the other Beings—the Beings of the Hierarchies—are the moral forces of Love whereby we on Earth expand our being in love to other beings. Thus in the faculty of Love here upon Earth we have an echo of the living in unison with the Hierarchies. While in Memory we have an echo of that other condition which was ours between death and a new birth, wherein we freed ourselves from the Hierarchies and found ourselves. As I said last time, this is not unlike the breathing process. We have to breathe in to fill ourselves with life. Then in a manner of speaking we breathe out the air of death. For life is impossible in the air which we breathe out. Likewise we breathe, as it were, in the Spirit, in the world between death and a new birth. We unite ourselves with the Beings of the Hierarchies and go out of them again. Here on this Earth we have a kind of echo of that heavenly breathing. In that we can walk here upon Earth, we adapt ourselves to earthly gravity. It is the principle of weight. I spoke in this connection of a transformed, metamorphosed ear. In like manner—if only we are able to look at it in the right way—we can still feel that we possess in our apparatus of speech and song a metamorphosis of what was planned in the spiritual World through which we passed in the pre-earthly life. It is only here on Earth that we adapt our organs of speech to human speech. In plan and tendency, between death and a new birth we receive unto ourselves the Logos—the Cosmic Word—the Cosmic speech. Out of this Cosmic speech our whole organ of speech and song is formed and created to begin with. Just as we transform this ‘ear’ that reaches downward, into the apparatus of walking and orientation in space, so do we transform the organ of speech and song. But in this case the metamorphosis is not so far-reaching. In the former case there remains behind, in the ear itself, a faithful image of what was formed in the pre-earthly life in spiritual worlds. With the organ of speech there is an intermediate position.

Not until we are here on Earth do we learn to speak. Yet this, in a deeper sense, is an illusion. In truth it is the Cosmic speech which forms our larynx and all our organs of speech and song. We only forget the Cosmic Logos, when we turn toward the Earth and pass through embryonic life. And we refresh once more what was impressed in our unconscious being, when in our early childhood we acquire human speech.

Nevertheless, in this human speech the earthly element is clearly perceptible, side by side with that which is formed out of the Spiritual. We could pronounce no consonants if we could not adapt ourselves to the things of the outer world. In the consonants we always have after-formations, imitations of what the outer world presents to us. Anyone who has a feeling for it will feel the one consonant reminiscent of something hard and angular, the other reminiscent of the quality of velvet. In the consonant we adapt ourselves to the forms and shapes of the outer world. In the vowels we give out our own inner being. He who says Ah, knows that in the Ah he expresses something that lives in his inner soul as a feeling of wonder or astonishment. Likewise in the O there is an inner quality. Every vowel expresses some element of the inner life.

In time to come there will be an interesting branch of knowledge, permeated with spiritual science. It will be found that in languages in which the consonants predominate, human beings can far less be called to account morally, because they are much less responsible for their deeds, than in those languages where vowels predominate. For the vowels are an echo of our living together with the spiritual Hierarchies. This is a thing that we bring with us, we carry it down on to the Earth and it remains with us; it is our own revelation. While in the consonants we adapt ourselves to the outer world. The world of consonants is earthly; and if we could imagine a language containing only consonants, an initiate would say of such a language: ‘It is for the earthly realm; and if you would possess the Heavenly, you must add the vowels to it. But have a care! for you will then become responsible to the Divine. You may not treat it so profanely then, as you can treat the consonants.’

The old Hebrews took this into account. Only the consonants are written out fully, the vowels only indicated. In our language in effect the Heavenly and Earthly sound together. Here once again we see how we have in the middle man something that is ordered as it were in two directions, towards the Heavenly and towards the Earthly. The head is altogether related to the heavenly. The other pole of man is related to the earthly, but strives towards the Heavenly—strives in such a way that it becomes the Heavenly, when man has passed through the gate of death. The middle man, to whom the breathing belongs—and with the breathing the activity of speech and song—brings the Heavenly and the Earthly together. Hence the middle man contains above all the artistic faculty of man, the artistic tendency, which is always to unite the Heavenly with the Earthly.

And so we may say: Regard the growing human being. He is born without orientation in the outer world. He cannot yet walk or stand. True, he has already the potentiality to enter into the ordering of earthly gravity. For he received this tendency already in the embryonic life before his birth, when—apart from the head—gravity took hold of him. An organ like the human eye or ear has in fact been wrested away from the incursions of gravity. The act of orientation in space now finds expression in the little child's learning to walk and to stand upright. We only finish learning this after our birth. For we are born not yet orientated for walking. If we retained the orientation we then have, we should at most perhaps be able to sleep on Earth. For in effect, the little bone in the ear, which represents the foot, is horizontally directed. We might at most be able to sleep, but we could not walk. Similar things would need to be said about the human eye.

This, then, is one thing that we finish learning here on Earth. We adapt to the earthly forces of gravity what we acquired in the pre-earthly life. And when we learn to speak and sing, it is a second act of adaptation: we adapt ourselves to our environment in the surrounding sphere, in the horizon of the Earth. Lastly we learn to think. For we are born in truth unorientated for walking and standing, and we are born speechless, and even thoughtless. It cannot be said that the little baby is already able to think. These three things, we finish learning on the Earth. Nevertheless they are metamorphoses of other faculties which we possessed in the pre-earthly life. For each one of the three is a living monument of what was planned in us in a spiritual form in our pre-earthly life.

Our Memory here on the Earth is the echo of our being-within-ourselves in the Spiritual World. And Love, in all its forms, is the echo of our being-poured-out into the world of the Hierarchies. We have, as we have seen, our bodily faculties: Walking, Speaking, Singing and Thinking (for it is only prejudice to imagine that thought on the earth is a spiritual faculty; our earthly thinking is essentially bound to the physical body, just as our walking is)—these outstanding faculties of the body are transformations, metamorphoses, of the spiritual. Then, in the soul, we have the outstanding faculties of soul: Memory and Love, once more as transformations out of the spiritual. And what have we spiritually on the Earth? It is our faculty of sense-perception. Our seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and so forth: all this is sense-perception; and the organs for this sense-perception, situated as they are at the outer periphery of our organism, are formed and built out of the highest Spiritual regions. Out of the harmony of the Spheres the ear is formed, so much so that it remains protected from the force of gravity. The whole way the ear is placed into this fluid, has the purpose of protecting it from the force of gravity. The ear is situated in the fluid in such a way that gravity cannot come near it. Truly the ear is no earthly citizen; in all its organisation it is a citizen of the Spiritual world. Likewise the eye, and the other sense-organs too. Observe then the body in its Walking, Speaking, Singing, Thinking: we have the transformations of the spiritual from the pre-earthly life. Lastly the senses: they are the transformation of the highest Spiritual from the pre-earthly life.

Here it is that we with our anthroposophical spiritual science take our start on the one hand from Goetheanism, from what was already known to Goethe. We, of course, have to go farther, in a way entirely consistent with Goethe. I have often quoted Goethe's saying that ‘the eye is formed in the Light and for the Light’. Yes, my dear friends, but not in the light or for the light that we see. Consider a human being, a human countenance: the high forehead, the prominent nose, the eyes, the physiognomy. We add to it the living gesture. If we merely registered the spatial forms by some kind of apparatus, we should still have the forms. But when we see a human being, we are not content merely to photograph the spatial forms as with an outward apparatus. We look through the spatial movement of the gestures to the soul that lies behind. Likewise the sunlight: it penetrates towards us. There is the outer sun, the sunlight comes to us. That is only the ‘front’ of it; behind it is the ‘other side’ of the sunlight—the soul, the Spirit of the sunlight, and in this soul and Spirit we ourselves indwell between death and a new birth. There the Light is something altogether different. When you speak of the ‘look’ of a man, you mean the life of soul that comes out to meet you through his eyes; you really mean what lies behind the eye, within the soul. And if I now speak of the Spiritual in the light, I too mean what lies ‘behind’, within the sun. That is the Spirit, the soul of the light. The finished eye sees the ‘front’ of the light, the physical aspect; but the eye itself was formed by the soul and Spirit of the light, by that which lies ‘behind’. Thus having understood Goethe's saying, we should put it thus: ‘The eye which sees the light is formed by the soul and Spirit of the light, ere ever it assumes physical existence here on Earth.’

In the whole human being we see transformed spiritual being, which is to be transformed back again. At death you give your physical sense-organs to the Earth, but that which is living in the physical sense-organs lights up between death and a new birth, and becomes your inner being-together, your communion with the spiritual Being of the Hierarchies. Now we understand how the earthly world of sound is the physical reflection of the heavenly harmony of the Spheres, and how man is a product not of these earthly forces but of heavenly forces, who places himself into the midst of the earthly. Moreover, we see how he places himself into the midst of the earthly. He would become an ear downward; and if he remained in this state he certainly would not walk, but would assume another kind of movement; for he would have to move on the waves of cosmic Harmonies, even as the tiny image, the little bone in the ear, moves on the waves of the drum. With the ear we learn to hear; with the larynx and other organs that lie towards and within the mouth itself, we learn to speak and sing. You hear some word, for instance Baum or Tree. You yourself can speak the word Tree. In your ear, in organs formed and modelled after heavenly activities, as I described just now, there lives what you express in the simple word Tree. Again, you yourself can say the word. What does it signify that you can say the word Tree? By the larynx, by the organs of the mouth, etc., the earthly air is brought into such formations that the word Tree is expressed. There in reality you have a second ear, over against your hearing. And there is yet a third, which is only insufficiently perceived. When you hear the word Tree, you yourself with your etheric body—not with your physical but with your etheric body—speak the word Tree very quietly to yourself; and through the so-called Eustachian tube, which passes from the mouth into the ear, the word Tree sounds forth ethereally, going out to meet the word that comes to you from without; and the two meet, and thus you understand the word. Otherwise you would only hear it and it would be nothing in particular. You understand it by saying back through the Eustachian tube what comes towards you from outside. In that the vibrations from outside meet the vibrations from within, and interpenetrate, the inner man understands what comes to him from without.

You see how wonderfully all things work and weave into one another in the human organism. But that is not all; another thing too is connected with it. Suppose it is your intention to learn about the human being, the organisation of his ear, his eye, his nose and so forth. Good and well! You say to yourself: science has made magnificent advances, and these advances of science—though they are a little expensive nowadays¹—still, you can buy them if you can obtain the necessary number of marks. You buy a text-book of anatomy or physiology according as you want to learn about the forms or the functions. You go to a University and listen to what is said there about the eye or ear; or you read it for yourself. But I think your heart will still be left cold. Let outer physical science describe the ear to you; your heart is left cold, it is not really interested. The thing is objective enough in that sense! But if I describe it to you as I have done just now, if I show how your understanding of the word Tree comes about; and how the ear is an after-image of Heavenly activities: I should like to know the soul whose life of feeling would not be stirred by this, who would not feel the wonder of it, who would not really feel with such a description. True, the description has been given imperfectly today; it could be given more perfectly. Then it would appear still more strongly. But in very truth, one would have to be inwardly dried up if at such a description one did not feel wonder and reverence for the Universe and for the way in which Man himself is placed out of the spiritual world into the physical. Such is the quality of anthroposophical Spiritual Science. It describes things no less objectively than ordinary science; for nothing at all subjective is mingled with it, when I describe how the ear is formed and shaped out of the Heavenly spheres. And yet the heart, the life of feeling is immediately called into play. The second member of the human life of soul, intimately connected as it is with the wholeness of our humanity, is called into play. Whatever the head acquires through such a science, the heart is immediately taken hold of by it. Thus, anthroposophical science goes to the heart of man. It is not a science of the head, it is a science that goes straight to the heart. It fills not only the head, it fills and fulfils the human being of the blood, the circulation, the heart.

Or again, take in real earnest what I said just now. When we move our legs ... well, you can study the mechanism of the movements in the ordinary way. Take one of these textbooks of Physiology; let the mechanism of the movements of the legs be explained to you. One thing will certainly not be kindled in you—the feeling of responsibility. But when you discover that the good or evil purpose to which your legs are moving rings out towards you after death from the Divine Worlds as harmony or dissonance; that the Divine Words of Judgment on all your actions sound towards you; the moment you discover this, your science is accompanied by a feeling of responsibility, and this will then accompany also the actions of your Will. Not only our life of Feeling but our life of Will is called into play by what we learn—to begin with, for our heads—just as objectively as in outer science. Yet it strikes down into the man of Feeling and into the man of Will. Anthroposophical science speaks to the whole man. Increasingly in modern time we have come to regard that alone as science which speaks only to the head; but speaking only to the head, it leaves the Feeling cold and does not in any way call forth the Will. This is the critical point at which we stand. It follows that the knowledge of super-sensible worlds must be attained by the whole man. Already when we arise to Imaginative cognition we must come to it by inner activity. Ordinary learning is acquired in certain circles (which are indeed well suited to this purpose)—it is acquired by ‘swotting’. Acquired thus, it is incorporated in the memory. But let us suppose that by such exercises as are described in ‘Knowledge of Higher Worlds and its Attainment,’ you reach Imaginative cognition. Or suppose you are so constituted that the world of spiritual concepts is already given to you as a native talent and predisposition of your life, as I described it in my book on ‘Goethe's World-conception.’ (For already then you are in the process of etheric cognition which is at the same time living inner experience.) Then you cannot give yourself thus passively to the world. Spiritual science cannot be ‘swotted’. That, maybe, is a bad joke, but after all, it is they who are only used to ‘swotting’ who chiefly look down on spiritual science. Spiritual science, as you are well aware, must be acquired with inner activity. We ourselves in our inner life must do something for it, we must be inwardly alert and quick. Even then, it will always happen that what we attain at first in spiritual Imagination is quickly lost. It is fleeting, it disappears quickly. It is not easily incorporated in our memory. After three days all that we have attained in this region—that is to say, only by the ordinary effort to bring it to Imagination—is certain to have disappeared. It is for the same reason that the memory in the etheric body after death disappears after three days. For it is the same activity after death, when we remember through the etheric body for about three days. The period varies; you can read about this in my ‘Occult Science,’ but we remember for approximately three days—that is to say, so long as we possess the etheric body. In the same manner he who has reached some discovery by etheric cognition knows that it will have flown away after three days, if he does not make every effort to bring it down into the ordinary concepts.

Formerly I always had recourse to the method of putting down at once, in writing or in little drawings, all that I attained in this way. For the head is called into play. It is not a question of mediumistic writing, nor does one write it down in order afterwards to read it. Indeed in my present way of life that would be immensely difficult. Recently when I was in Berlin I saw again what quantities of notebooks have accumulated there. If I wanted to read anything of it, I should not have it handy when I was in Stuttgart or in Dornach. No, it is not a question of reading it afterwards; the point is only to be engaged in this activity, which is an activity of the head. For then we unite the Imaginative thinking with the ordinary thinking. Then we can remember it, give lectures on it. If we did not make such efforts we could at most talk about it on the very next day. Afterwards it would have disappeared, just as the panorama of our life disappears three days after our death.

You see, therefore, that Imaginative thinking is already related to the whole human being. The whole human being must be living in Imaginative Knowledge. With the higher forms of Knowledge it is still more so. Therefore you need not wonder if the appeal of such knowledge is to the whole man. Then too we feel there is infinitely more in the world than is perceptible to the outer senses. And above all, we feel how it is possible to live in a world in which Space no longer has any meaning. Musical experience is already a foretaste, if I may so describe it, of the Non-spatial. For the spatial is outside of us; it is outwardly existent. But in the inner experience which is realised through music, the spatial element scarcely plays a part. There is at most an echo of it. And in Imaginative cognition, gradually, the spatial ceases altogether. All things become temporal. The temporal signifies the same for the Imaginative realm as the spatial element for the physical. Moreover, this will lead us to yet another thing, namely, that the element of time is really permanent; it is a thing that remains. He who arises to Imaginative knowledge gradually learns to perceive at every point of his past Earth-existence (and this is only the beginning). He may be quite an old man; he now becomes eighteen years old again. He perceives his youth as vividly as he perceived it when he was eighteen years old. Suppose for instance that when you were eighteen years old you lost someone who was very dear to you. Think how vivid the experience was at that time. Think how faint it is in your memory after thirty years. There need not even be a lapse of thirty years; it very soon grows faint, even with those who are most rich in feeling; and in outer earthly life it must be so. But though in the subsequent ‘present’ it fades away, it nevertheless remains, as an essential part of the human being; and we can actually transplant ourselves into it again. Indeed, after our death we are thus transplanted. Then we experience the same thing again with the same intensity. Whatever a man has gone through belongs to him. It remains; it is only for his perception, for his vision, that it is past. Hence, too, it has its real significance.

If you were born at the age of seven—if you lived till your seventh year in some other state of existence, say as an embryo—if you were only born at the age of seven, yet so as to receive your second teeth at once, having had the first already in the former state; then you could never become a religious man or woman. For the predisposition to a religious nature could not work on into an earthly life which had begun in that way. All the religious tendency which you possess—you bear it within you because the first seven years of your life are present in you. You do not perceive them as a living present; nevertheless they are there in you as such. In the first seven years of life we are absolutely devoted to the outer world; truly that is a religious feeling. Only we afterwards transfer it to another realm. In our first seven years we have an impulse of imitation for all things that surround us. Afterwards we have the same sense of devotion to the things of soul and spirit.

And if we were born in the fourteenth year of our life—born in the state of puberty—we should never become moral men and women. For the moral qualities must be acquired by the inner development of the rhythmic life between the seventh and the fourteenth year. Hence we can have so great an influence on the moral education of man, in the first or elementary period of school life.

All this we afterwards bear within us. Indeed we constantly bear everything within us. If you cut your toe, it is far removed from your head, but you still experience through the head the pain you feel there. If today you feel religious, there is active within you what you experienced in soul—only then it was in respect to the outer world—until your seventh year, until the change of teeth. Just as you experience the pain in the toe through the activity of your head, so what you experienced before your seventh year is still active in your fortieth year; it is still there.

There is an important consequence of this. Many people say, Anthroposophical spiritual science is all very well; it teaches us about the spiritual worlds. But why need we know all these things about the experiences between death and a new birth? When we die we shall go into those worlds in any case, we shall discover it all in good time. Why need we make an effort between birth and death? We shall go there, presumably, whatever happens.

It is not really so. For the life of time is a reality. As the spatial is a reality here in the physical, so is the temporal—indeed, even the super-temporal—a reality in the spiritual world. Here on Earth the child-like man is still within you in your later life. When you pass through the gate of death the whole of time is within you in a single moment. It belongs to you, it is part and parcel of you. As a man of the world of space you might say: What need have I of an eye? The light is there around me in any case. The eye is only there to see the light, and I have the light around me anyhow. It would be the same, in another realm, to say ‘Why do we need a Spiritual Science here on Earth? When we enter the realm of Spirits the spiritual light will be around us anyhow.’ It is no wiser than to say, ‘The light is there in any case. Why should I need an eye?’ For what a man learns through Anthroposophical spiritual science is not lost to him in the spiritual world after death. It is the eye through which he then perceives the spiritual light. And if on Earth—this applies to the present stage of human evolution—he evolves no spiritual science, he has no eye through which he can see the spiritual world, and he is as if he were dazzled by what he experiences.

In ancient times people still had an instinctive clairvoyance as a late flower of their pre-earthly life. But this is past, it has died away. The old instinctive clairvoyance is no longer there. In the intervening stage of human evolution men have had to acquire the feeling of inner freedom. They have now entered once more upon the stage where they need an eye for the spiritual world into which they will enter after death. This eye they will not have if they do not acquire it here on Earth. As the physical eye must be acquired in the pre-earthly life, so must the eye, for the perception of the spiritual world, be acquired here on earth through spiritual science, active spiritual knowledge. I do not mean through clairvoyance—that is an individual affair—but through the understanding, with healthy intelligence, of what is discovered by clairvoyant research. It is simply untrue to say that one must see into the spiritual world oneself in order to believe what the clairvoyants see. It is not so. Use your healthy human understanding, and you will see that the ear is in truth an organ of Heaven. Such a fact can only be found by clairvoyant research. Once found it can be seen and recognised. We need only be prepared to think the thing out, and feel it through and through. It is this recognition by healthy human understanding, of what is given out of the spiritual world—it is not the clairvoyance, but the activity of knowledge—which provides us with spiritual eyes after death. The clairvoyant has to acquire this spiritual eye just the same as other men. For what we gain by Imaginative Cognition, what we perceive in seership, falls away and vanishes after a few days. It only does not do so if we bring it down to the standpoint of ordinary understanding, and in that case we are obliged to understand it in the very same way in which it is understood by those to whom we communicate it. In effect, clairvoyance as such is not the essential task of man on earth. Clairvoyance must only be there in order that the super-sensible truths may be found. But the task of man on earth is to understand the super-sensible truths with ordinary, healthy human understanding.

This is exceedingly important. Yet this is the very thing which many people—including some of the finer spirits—at the present day will not admit. A little while ago, in Berlin, I had been explaining this point in a public lecture. Someone then described it as a special sin to say that the truth of Spiritual Science was to be seen with healthy human understanding. For he declared, quite dogmatically, that the intellect if healthy sees nothing spiritual; and, conversely, an intellect that sees spiritual things cannot be said to be healthy. This objection was actually made. Such a thing is characteristic, for what it amounts to in the long run is that these people are saying to themselves, ‘Anyone who asserts anything spiritual has a diseased mind.’ No further wisdom beyond this is required! But such wisdom, unhappily, is widespread nowadays. You see from this how true it is—what I have always said—that the time has come again when mankind absolutely needs to receive the spiritual, to incarnate the spiritual, and live with it. Hence, my dear friends, we should not only acquire anthroposophical spiritual science theoretically. In all of us who acquire spiritual science, the consciousness should live, that we are the kernel of a humanity which will grow and grow, until it comes about once more that only he who is conscious of his connection with the spiritual is seen as having found his full humanity. Then there will come over mankind a powerful feeling, a feeling that it is above all important to put into effect in education, in teaching. Ordinary head-knowledge is morally neutral. But we find the spiritual sphere, as soon as we reach up to it, permeated everywhere by morality. You need only remember what I said: It is in being together with the higher Hierarchies that we develop Love. Morality on Earth is only an image of the experience in heavenly spheres. And how do we experience that which we call the Good? We experience it thus: Man is in truth not only a physical but a spiritual being. And if he truly lives his way into the spiritual world, he learns to receive—with the Spirit—the Good into himself.

That, too, is the essential thought of the Philosophy of Freedom,—of Spiritual Activity. Man learns to receive, with the Spirit, what is Good. And if he does not receive the Good into himself, he is not a full human being, but stunted and crippled. It is as though both his arms had been shot away. If his arms are taken from him he is physically crippled; if the Good is lacking to him he is crippled in soul and spirit. Transform this thought, with all its influence on will and feeling, into a method of education. Educate in such a way that when the age of puberty arrives—for it must be developed by that time—man has the living feeling: ‘If I am not good, I am not a whole man—I have not the right to call myself a man.’ Then you will have good moral instruction, true moral teaching of mankind, as against which all emphasis on moral preaching and the like is worth nothing.

Educate the human being so that he feels the moral element within him as an essential part of his own human individuality, and feels himself crippled when he lacks it—feels that he is not a full human being when he does not possess it. Then, in time, he will discover the moral life entirely within himself. Well may it be that all your philosophic pedants will call this a dreadful principle—un-German, or what you will. In truth it is the purest product of the German spirit.² It is the principle that brings the Spirit as near as possible to Man himself—and not alone to Man in general, but to the single human individual directly, for this is necessary in our time. During the present epoch only the single human being—the individual himself—reaches his full responsibility.

• 1. Through the inflation of the mark.
• 2. To find within oneself the source of moral impulses is of course, as Rudolf Steiner indicated from his Philosophy of Freedom onwards, a general human task. But to those who attacked his ‘ethical individualism’ as un-German, Rudolf Steiner could show that such thoughts had deep roots in German spiritual life—in Schiller, Goethe and Fichte, for example. (Tr.)

These lectures will deal with the two states of life through which man passes: in the spiritual world between death and a new birth, and in the physical world between birth and death.

I want to remind you today of certain matters to which your attention was directed in recent lectures here. I said that during the very important period stretching between death and a new birth, man finds himself in the spiritual world with an essentially higher kind of consciousness than he has during his physical life on Earth.

When we are living here on Earth in our physical body, the earthly consciousness that is connected with the senses and nerves depends upon the whole organism. We feel ourselves as human beings in as much as within the boundary of our skin we have brain, lungs, heart, and the systems connected, with these organs. Of all this we say that it is within our being. On the other hand we feel ourselves connected with what is around us through our senses or through our breathing, or again through the taking of food. When we are living between death and rebirth we cannot, however, speak in the same sense of what is ‘within’ us. For directly we pass through the gate of death, even directly we go to sleep, the conditions of our existence are such that the whole universe may be designated as our inner being.

Thus whereas here on Earth our constitution as human beings is revealed by our organs and their interaction inside our skin, during sleep unconsciously but between death and a new birth in full consciousness, our inner nature is revealed to us as if it were a world of stars. We feel ourselves related to the world of stars in such a way that of the Beings of the stars we say that they are our inner nature, just as here on Earth we say that the lung or heart belong to our inner physical nature. From the time of going to sleep until that of waking, we have a cosmic life; from death until a new birth we have a cosmic consciousness. That which here on Earth is our outer world, particularly when we gaze out into the cosmic expanse, becomes our inner being after death.

What, then, is our outer world in that spiritual existence? It is what is now our inner nature. We fashion what is then our outer world into a kind of spirit-seed from which our future physical body on Earth is to spring into existence. Together with the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies we elaborate this spirit-seed, and at a certain point of time in our life between death and a new birth, it is there as a spirit-entity, bearing within it the forces which then build up the physical body, just as the seed of the plant bears within it the forces which will eventually produce the plant. But whereas we picture the seed of the plant to be minute and the plant itself large in comparison, the spirit-seed of the human physical body is, so to speak, a universe of vast magnitude—although in the strict sense it is not quite accurate to speak of ‘magnitude’ in this connection.

I have also said that at a certain point this spirit-seed falls away from us. From a certain point of time onwards we feel: in association with other Beings of the Universe, with Beings of the Higher Hierarchies, we have brought the spirit-seed of our physical organism to a definite stage of development; now it falls away from us and descends into the physical forces of the Earth with which it is related and which come from the father and the mother. It unites with the human element in the stream of heredity and goes down to the Earth before we, as beings of spirit-and-soul, ourselves descend. Thus we still spend a certain period—although a short one—in the spiritual world when the nexus of forces of our physical organism has already gone down to the Earth and is shaping the embryo in the body of the mother.

It is during this period that we gather together from the cosmic ether its own forces and substances and so build up our etheric body to be added to our astral body and ego. Then, as a being of ego, astral body and etheric body, we ourselves come down to the Earth and unite with what the physical body—the seed of which was sent down earlier—has now become.

To anyone who observes this process closely, the relation of man to the Universe becomes very clear, above all if attention is directed to three manifestations of human nature to which reference has often been made here and at other places—I mean the three manifestations of human nature by virtue of which man becomes the being that he is on Earth.

When we are born we are quite different from the beings we afterwards become. It is on the Earth that we first learn to walk, to speak, and to think. The will that remains dim between birth and death, and feeling that remains half dim, are already present in a primitive form in the very tiny child. The life of feeling, although it is concerned entirely with the inner functions, is present in the very earliest years of childhood. The life of will is also present, as is proved by the movements, however chaotic, made by the little child. The reason why the life of feeling and the life of will become different at a later stage of existence is that thinking gradually begins to permeate feeling and will, making them more mature. Nevertheless they are already present in the tiny child. Thinking, on the other hand, is developed by the child only on Earth, in association with other human beings and in a certain sense under their instruction. And it is the same with the faculties of walking and speaking, which in reality are acquired before the faculty of thinking.

Anyone who has a sufficiently deep feeling for what is truly human will realize, simply by observing how the child develops through walking, speaking, and thinking, what a tremendously important part is played by these three faculties in the earthly evolution of man. But man is not only an earthly being; he is a being who belongs not only to the Earth with its forces and substances, but equally to the spiritual world; he is involved in the activities proceeding between the several Beings of the Higher Hierarchies. It is, so to speak, only with a part of his being that man belongs to earthly existence; with the other part he belongs to a world that is not the material world perceptible to the senses. It is in that other world that he prepares his spirit-seed. Let it never be imagined that man's achievements in culture and civilization on the Earth, however complex and splendid they may be, are at all comparable with the greatness of what is achieved by him together with the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies in order to build this wonder-structure of the human physical organism. Nevertheless, what is thus fashioned—first of all in the spiritual world and, as I explained, sent down to the Earth before the man himself descends—is differently constituted from the being who is afterwards present here on Earth between birth and death.

The spirit-seed of his physical body built up by man in the spiritual world is imbued with forces. Its whole structure which afterwards unites with the physical seed—or rather, which becomes the physical seed of the human being by taking substances from the parents—is endowed with all kinds of qualities and faculties. But there are three faculties for which the spirit-seed receives no forces at all in the spiritual world. These three faculties are: thinking, speaking, and walking—which are essentially activities of man on the Earth.

Let us take walking, and everything that is related to it. I might describe it as the process whereby man orientates himself within the sphere of his physical existence on Earth. When I move my arm or my hand, that too is related to the mechanism of walking, and when a tiny child begins to raise itself upright, that is an act of orientation. All this is connected with what we call the Earth's force of gravity, with the fact that everything physical on the Earth has weight. But we cannot say of the spirit-seed that is built up between death and a new birth that it has weight or heaviness.—Walking, then, is connected with the force of gravity. It is, in fact, an overcoming of gravity, an act through which we place ourselves into the field of gravity. That is what happens every time we lift a leg to take a step forward. But we do not acquire this faculty until we are already here on Earth; it is not present between death and a new birth although there is something that corresponds to it in that world. There too we have orientation but it is not orientation within the field of gravity, for in the spiritual world there is no force of gravity, no weight. Orientation in that world is of a purely spiritual character. Here on the Earth we lift our legs to walk, we place ourselves in the field of gravity. The corresponding process in the spiritual world is that of becoming related to some Being of the Higher Hierarchies, belonging, let us say, to the rank of Angel or Archangel. A man feels himself inwardly near in soul to the influence of a Being, say, of the Hierarchy of the Angels, or of the Exusiai, with whom he is then working. This is how he finds his orientation in the life between death and a new birth. Just as here on the Earth we have to deal with our weight, in yonder world we have to deal with what proceeds from the several Beings of the higher Hierarchies by way of forces of sympathy with our own human individuality.

The force of gravity has a single direction—towards the Earth; but what corresponds to the force of gravity in the spiritual world has all directions, for the spiritual Beings of the Hierarchies are not centralized, they are everywhere. The orientation is not geometrical like the orientation of gravity, towards the center of the Earth, but it goes in all directions. According to whether man has to build up his lung or perform some other work together with the Beings of the Hierarchies, he can say to himself: The Third Hierarchy is attracting me, or the First Hierarchy is attracting me. He feels himself placed into the whole world of the Hierarchies. He feels himself, as it were, drawn to all sides, not physically, as through the pull of gravity, but spiritually, or also, in some cases, repelled. This is what corresponds in the spiritual world to physical orientation within the sphere of gravity on the Earth.

Here, on the Earth, we learn to speak. This again belongs to our inherent nature, but within the spiritual world between death and a new birth we cannot speak; the physical organs needed for speech are not there. In the spiritual world between death and a new birth, we have, however, the following experience.—We feel ourselves in rhythmically alternating conditions; at one moment we have contracted, as it were, into our own being; our higher consciousness also contracts. Between death and a new birth there are times when we shut ourselves within ourselves, just as we do while we are asleep on Earth. But then we open ourselves again. Just as on the physical Earth we direct our eyes and other senses out towards the Universe, so in that other world we direct our spiritual organs of perception outwards to the Beings of the Hierarchies. We let our being stream out, as it were, into the far spaces, and then draw it together again.

It is a spiritual breathing process, but its course is such that if we were to describe in earthly words, in pictures derived from earthly life, what man says to himself there in the spiritual world, we should have to speak somewhat as follows: I, as a human being in the spiritual world, have this or that to do. I know this through the powers of perception I have in the spiritual world between death and a new birth. I feel myself to be this human being, this individuality. As I breathe out on Earth, so do I pour myself out in soul into the Universe and become one with the Cosmos. As I breathe in on Earth, so do I receive back into myself what I experienced while my being was poured out into the Cosmos.—This is constantly taking place between death and a new birth.

Let us think of a man feeling himself enclosed within his own being and then as though expanded into the cosmos. At one moment he is concentrated in himself and then has expanded into the Universe. When he draws into himself again it is just as when we breathe in the air from the physical spaces of the Universe.

Now when we have poured our being over the Cosmos and draw it in again, it begins—I cannot express it otherwise—it begins to tell us what it was that we embraced when our being was outspread as it were, in the cosmic expanse. When we draw our being together again it begins to tell us what it is in reality, and we then say, between death and a new birth: The Logos in whom we first immersed ourselves—the Logos is speaking within us.

Here on the Earth we have the feeling that in our physical speech we shape the words when we exhale. Between death and a new birth we become aware that the words which are outspread in the Universe and reveal its essential nature, enter into us when our being is inbreathed and manifest themselves within us as the Cosmic Word. Here on Earth we speak as we breathe out; in the spiritual world we speak as we breathe in. And as we unite with our own being what the Logos—the Cosmic Word—says to us, the Cosmic Thoughts light up within our being. Here on Earth we make efforts through our nervous system to harbor earthly thoughts. In the spiritual world we draw into ourselves the Cosmic Thoughts out of the Cosmic Speech of the Logos when our being has been spread over the Universe.

Now try to form a vivid conception of the following. Suppose that you say to yourself between death and a new birth: I have this or that to do ... all that you have experienced hitherto makes you aware that you have this or that task to perform. Then, with the intention of performing it, you spread your being into the Universe; but the process of expansion is actually one of orientation.

When you say to yourself here on Earth that you must buy some butter ... that too signifies an intention. You set out for Basle to buy your butter there, and bring it home with you. Between death and a new birth you also have intentions—in connection, of course, with what has to be achieved in that other world. Then you expand your being; this is done with the intention of acquiring orientation—it may be that you are drawn to an Angel or perhaps to a Being of Will, or to some other Being. Such a Being unites with your own expanded being. You breathe in; this Being communicates to you its participation in the Logos and the Cosmic Thoughts connected with this Being light up within you.

When the spirit-seed of man comes down to the Earth (as I have said, he himself remains a little while longer in the spiritual world), he is not organized for thinking or speaking in the earthly sense, nor for walking in the earthly sense, when gravity is involved; but he is organized for movement and for orientation among the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies. He is not organized for speaking but for enabling the Logos to resound within him. He is not organized for the shadowy thoughts of earthly life, but for the thoughts that become radiant in him, within the Cosmos.

Walking, speaking, and thinking here on the Earth have their correspondences in the spiritual world: in the orientation among the Hierarchies, in the resounding of the Cosmic Word, and in the inner lighting up of the Cosmic Thoughts.

Picture vividly to yourselves how man goes out after death into the wide space of the Cosmos. He passes through the planetary spheres around the Earth. I have spoken of these things in recent lectures here. He passes the Moon-sphere, the Venus-sphere, the Mercury-sphere, the Jupiter-sphere, the Saturn-sphere. Having passed right out into the Cosmos he will see the stars always from the other side. You must picture the Earth and the stars around it. From the Earth we look up to the stars; but when we are in the Cosmos we look from outside inwards. The forces that enable us here on Earth to see the stars, give us the physical image of the stars. The forces that enable us to see the stars from the other side, do not allow them to appear to us as they do here, but from that other world the stars appear to us as spiritual Beings. And then, when we leave the planetary spheres—I am obliged to use earthly expressions—then, as conditions now are in world-evolution (the ‘now’ is, of course, a cosmic ‘now’ of lengthy duration), we realize with the understanding acquired through the higher consciousness belonging to our life between death and a new birth, what an infinite blessing it is for us that the forces of Saturn not only shine inwards into the planetary world of the Earth, but also outwards into the cosmic expanse. There, of course, they are something altogether different from the tiny, insignificant, bluish rays of Saturn that can be visible to us here on Earth. There they are spiritual rays, radiating out into the Universe—even ceasing to be spatial; they radiate into a sphere beyond space. They appear to us in such a way that between death and rebirth we look back in gratitude to the outermost planet of our earthly planetary system (for Uranus and Neptune are not actual Earth planets; they were added at a later stage). We are aware that this outermost planet not only shines down upon the Earth but out into the far spaces of the Cosmos. And to the spiritual rays which it radiates out into the Cosmos we owe the fact that we are now divested of earthly gravity, divested of the physical forces of speech, divested of the physical forces of thought. Saturn, as it radiates out into cosmic space is in very truth our greatest benefactor between death and a new birth. Regarded from a spiritual standpoint it constitutes, in this respect, the very antithesis of the Moon-forces.

The spiritual Moon-forces keep us on the Earth. The spiritual Saturn-forces enable us to live in the wide expanse of the Universe. Here, on Earth, the Moon-forces are of very special significance for us as human beings. I have explained that they play their part even in the everyday happening of waking from sleep. What the Moon-forces are for us here on Earth, the Saturn-forces that radiate into the Universe from the outermost sphere of our planetary system are for us between death and a new birth. You must not picture that from one side Saturn radiates towards the Earth and from another out into the Universe. It is not so. The physical Saturn appears like a hollow in this sphere of the cosmic Saturn which radiates, spiritually, into cosmic space. And from a certain point of time onwards after death, what thus radiates outwards hides everything earthly from us—hides it all with light.

Here on Earth, man is under the influence of the spiritual Moon-forces; between death and a new birth, he is under the influence of the Saturn-forces. And when he descends again to the Earth he draws himself away from the Saturn-forces and enters gradually into the sphere of the Moon-forces. What happens then?

As long as man is related to the sphere of the Saturn-forces—and Saturn is helped by Jupiter and Mars which have special functions to perform of which I shall speak on some future occasion—as long, therefore, as man is under the influence of Saturn, Jupiter and Mars, he is a being who does not strive to walk or speak or think in the earthly sense, but to find his orientation among spiritual Beings, to experience the Logos resounding within him, to have the Cosmic Thoughts lighting up within him. And with these inner aims and intentions the spirit-seed of the physical organism is, in very truth, dispatched to the Earth.

In effect, the human being who is descending from the spiritual worlds to the Earth has not the least inclination to be exposed to earthly gravity, to walk, or to bring the organs of speech into movement so that physical speech may resound, neither has he any inclination to think with a physical brain about physical things. He has none of these faculties. He only acquires them when, as a physical spirit-seed, he is sent down from the sphere of the Saturn-forces to the Earth, passes through the Sun-sphere and then enters the other planetary spheres—the spheres of Mercury, Venus and Moon. The Mercury, Venus, and Moon-spheres transform the cosmic predisposition for spiritual orientation, experience of the Logos and lighting up of Cosmic Thoughts inwardly, into the rudimental faculties of walking, speaking, and thinking. And the actual change is effected by the Sun, that is to say, the spiritual Sun.

Through the fact that man enters the sphere of the Moon—and the Moon-forces are helped by those of Venus and Mercury—through this, the heavenly predispositions for orientation, for experience of the Logos, and for Cosmic Thought, are transformed into the earthly faculties. Thus to a child here on Earth, as he begins to raise himself upright from the crawling position, we ought in truth to say: Before you were received into the spheres of Mercury, Venus and Moon, yonder in the heavenly spheres you were organized for spiritual orientation among the Hierarchies, for inner experience of the resounding Logos, and for inner illumination with Cosmic Thoughts. You have accomplished the metamorphosis from yonder heavenly faculties into earthly faculties in that you passed through the whole planetary sphere, and transformation of the Heavenly into the Earthly was wrought by the Sun.

But while this is happening, something else of tremendous significance takes place. Passing from the heavenly into the earthly realm, the human being experiences one side only of the etheric world. The etheric world extends through all the spheres of the planets and the stars. But the moment the heavenly faculties are transformed into the earthly, the human being loses the experience of the Cosmic Morality. Orientation among the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies is experienced not merely as a manifestation of natural laws but as moral orientation. Likewise the Logos speaks in the human being not in an a-moral way as do the phenomena of Nature—for although they do not speak in an anti-moral way, they speak ‘a-morally.’ The Logos speaks morality; so too the Cosmic Thoughts light up as bearers of morality.

Saturn, Jupiter and Mars—this must be said despite the horror it will cause to physicists—Saturn, Jupiter and Mars contain, as well as their other forces, forces of moral orientation. It is only when man transforms the heavenly faculties that have been characterized into walking, speaking, and thinking that he loses the moral elements. This is of immense importance. When here on Earth we speak of the ether—in which we live when we are approaching the Earth in order to be born—we ascribe to the ether all kinds of qualities. But that is only one side, one aspect, of the ether. The other aspect is that it is a substance working with a moral effect. It is permeated through and through with moral impulses. Just as it is permeated with light, so it is permeated with moral impulses. In the earthly ether these impulses are not present.

Yet man as an earthly being is not altogether bereft of the forces within which he lives between death and a new birth. Even if by some decree in the divine World-Order, man on the Earth had no inkling whatever that as well as having a physical nature he ought also to be a moral being, it might conceivably be that his earthly faculties of walking, speaking, and thinking would be dimly felt to correspond to a heavenly Orientation, a heavenly Logos, a heavenly illumination with Cosmic Thoughts. True, without some inner stimulus man knows very little on Earth of these heavenly correspondences of his earthly faculties; but for all that he has faint inklings of them. If there were no after-effects of the Heavenly here on Earth, every link binding man with the spiritual world would have been forgotten, leaving not a single trace. Even conscience would not stir.—I will take my start from something quite concrete, and although what I shall now say will seem strange to begin with, it is in exact accordance with facts established by spiritual research.

Think of the Earth with the air around it; farther outward is the cosmic ether, gradually passing over into the spiritual sphere. Here on the Earth we inhale and exhale the air. This is the rhythm of breathing. But out yonder we pour our being into the Cosmos, receiving into ourselves the Logos and the Cosmic Thoughts. There we let the World, the Universe, speak in us. This too takes place in rhythm—in a rhythm determined by the world of the stars. Out in the Cosmos there is also rhythm. As human beings on the Earth we have the rhythm of breathing, which is related in a definite way to the rhythm of blood-circulation: four pulse-beats to one breath. In yonder world, we breathe out and breathe in again spiritually; this is cosmic rhythm. As men on Earth our life depends upon the fact that we take a definite number of breaths a minute and have a definite number of pulse-beats a minute. Out in the Universe we live in a cosmic rhythm, in that we breathe in, as it were, the moral-ethereal world; we are then within ourselves. And when we breathe it out again we are united with the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies.

Just as here in our physical body inside our skin, regular movements are set going rhythmically, so out in the universe the course and the positions of the stars set the cosmic rhythm into which we pass between death and a new birth. We live in the air, and in the air unfold our breathing rhythm with its extraordinarily true regularity. If the rhythm is irregular, this betokens illness for man. Out in the Universe—although we have first to pass through intermediate cosmic space—we experience the cosmic rhythm inasmuch as we are then living in the cosmic ether, permeated as it is with the moral element. Thus there are two different rhythms: human and cosmic. In truth they are both human rhythms, for the cosmic rhythm is the human rhythm between death and a new birth.

On the Earth, the Universe has, so to speak, the rhythm proper to mankind; in yonder world it has the rhythm in which we ourselves participate between death and rebirth. What, then, lies between the two? The rhythm proper to mankind gives us the faculty between birth and death to speak human words, to master human language. Cosmic rhythm enables us between death and a new birth to let the Cosmic Word resound within us. The Earth endows us with the gift of speech. The Universe, the spiritual Universe, gives us the Logos. You will realize that conditions are utterly different in the sphere where cosmic rhythm gives us the Logos, from conditions here on the Earth, where we articulate the human word in the air.

What, then, constitutes the boundary between the one realm and the other? Looking out into the physical world we have no perception of the cosmic rhythm. There is inner law and order in each realm, so what is it that lies between them? Between them—if I may put it so—is the boundary at which the cosmic rhythm breaks in that it is coming too near the Earth; between them is that which, in certain circumstances, may also bring the human breathing-rhythm into disorder. Between them, in effect, are all the phenomena pertaining to meteorology. If on the Earth there were no blizzards, storms, wind, cloud formations, if the air did not contain, in addition to oxygen and nitrogen for our breathing, these meteorological phenomena which are always there, however clear the air may appear to be—then we should look out into the Universe and be aware of a different rhythm—actually the counterpart of our breathing rhythm, only transformed into infinite grandeur. Between the two spheres of the World-Order lie the chaotic phenomena of wind and weather, separating the cosmic rhythm and the human breathing rhythm from each other.

Man on the Earth is subject to gravity. He co-ordinates his gait, every movement of his hands with this force of gravity. Out in the Universe the forces are altogether different. Orientation there is in all directions; the lines of force run from Being to Being of the Hierarchies. What is between the two? As meteorological phenomena are between heavenly rhythm and human rhythm on Earth, what is between the cosmic force that is the opposite of gravity and earthly gravity?

Now just as meteorological phenomena lie between the two rhythms, so between the force of gravity and the opposite heavenly force of orientation there lie the volcanic forces, the forces which manifest in earthquakes. These are irregular forces.

(Note by translator. At this point in the lecture, Dr. Steiner referred to the report alleging that Easter Island, far out in the Pacific Ocean with its marvellous relics of ancient civilizations had been destroyed by a terrible earthquake. It will be remembered that the report was afterwards found to have been incorrect.)

When viewed from the standpoint of the Cosmos in the way I have described, the forces working in meteorological phenomena are intimately connected with our breathing processes. What takes place in the operations of volcanic forces is connected with the forces of gravity in such a way that it would really seem as though from time to time the supersensible Powers were taking back fragments of the Earth by interfering with the laws of gravity and casting into chaos what the forces of gravity have gradually built up, in order to take it back again.

All earthly formations built up by the force of gravity are subject to these terrestrial phenomena. But whereas in the manifestations of weather the elements of air, warmth, and water are astir, in this case it is the solid and the watery elements that are involved. Here we have to do with forces that lead beyond the sphere of the regular laws of weight and gravity and which in course of time will do away with the Earth.

Now as well as the meteorological and volcanic manifestations there is a third kind of which I shall speak on another occasion. Ordinary science does not really know what to make of volcanic phenomena and often gives an explanation similar to the one I read just now in connection with the appalling earthquake which affected Easter Island. The author of an article on what was said to have happened was a geologist—therefore one possessed of expert knowledge in that particular domain. Having referred to what had happened, he added: When we reflect about the cause of these phenomena which recur from time to time and cause such destruction, we must include this recent earthquake in the category of tectonic tremors of the Earth.—What does this tell us? ‘Tectonic tremors of the Earth’ are tremors which cause an upheaval among portions of the Earth. So if we are to speak of the cause of such an upheaval, we must speak of the upheaval! Poverty comes from pauvreté!

It is indeed a fact that in order to see the connections between these things, we must approach the Spiritual. The moment we pass from the realm of ordinary natural law in some sphere—that of gravity, for example, or of rhythmic phenomena in the ether—the moment we pass from this into what is an apparent chaos (although through this chaos we are led into higher realms of the Cosmos) ... in other words, if we are to understand volcanic and meteorological phenomena, we must turn towards the Spiritual.

Happenings in world-existence that seem to be purely fortuitous—for so we call them—are revealed in the spiritual realm in their lawful setting. It is through the working of the meteorological domain that we, as human beings between birth and death, are taken out of the sphere in which we live between death and a new birth. If instead of the many abstractions current at the present time we are to speak concretely, we may say: In the Heavens man lives in a World-Order that is hidden from him here on Earth through the fact that he is involved in the meteorological phenomena of the surrounding atmosphere. The meteorological domain is the dividing-wall between what man experiences on the Earth and what he experiences between death and a new birth.

In this way I want, if I can, to show you the realities of these things, not merely to talk round them.

The essential purpose of the lectures I have been giving here for some weeks past was to show how through his spiritual life man partakes in what we may call the world of the Stars, just as through his physical life on Earth he partakes in earthly existence, earthly happenings. In the light of the outlook acquired through Anthroposophy we distinguish in man the forces that lie in his physical body and in his etheric or formative-forces body, and those that lie in his Ego and his astral body. You know, of course, that these two sides of his being are separated whenever he sleeps. And now we will think for a short time of a man while he is asleep. On the one side the physical body and the etheric body lie there in a state of unconsciousness; but the Ego and the astral body are also without consciousness.

We may now ask: Are these two unconscious sides of human nature also related during sleep?—We know indeed that in the waking state, where the ordinary consciousness of modern man functions, the two sides are related through thinking, through feeling and through willing. We must therefore picture to ourselves that when the Ego and astral body plunge down, as it were, into the etheric body and the physical body, thinking, feeling, and willing arise from this union.

Now when man is asleep, thinking, feeling, and willing cease. But when we consider his physical body we shall have to say: All the forces which, according to our human observation belong to Earth-existence are active in this physical body. This physical body can be weighed; put it on scales and it will prove to have a certain weight. We can investigate how material processes take their course within it—or at least we can imagine hypothetically that this is possible. We should find in it material processes that are a continuation of those processes to be found outside in Earth-existence; these continue within man's physical body in the process of nutrition. In his physical body we should also find what is achieved through the breathing process. It is only what proceeds from the head-organization of man, all that belongs to the system of senses and nerves, that is either dimmed or plunged in complete darkness during sleep.

If we then pass on to consider the etheric body which permeates the physical, it is by no means so easy to understand how this etheric body works during sleep. Anyone, however, who is already versed to a certain extent in what Spiritual Science has to say about man will realize without difficulty how through his etheric body the human being lives, even while asleep, amid all the conditions of the ether-world and all the etheric forces surrounding existence on Earth. So that we can say: Within the physical body of man while he is asleep, everything that belongs to Earth-existence is active. So too in the etheric body all that belongs to the ether-world enveloping and permeating the Earth is active.

But matters become more difficult when we turn our attention—naturally our soul's attention—to what is now (during sleep) outside the physical and etheric bodies, namely, to the Ego and astral body of man. We cannot possibly accept the idea that this has anything to do with the physical Earth, or with what surrounds and permeates the Earth as ether. As to what takes place during sleep, I indicated it to you in a more descriptive way in the lectures given here a short time ago, and I will outline it today from a different point of view. We can in reality only understand what goes on in the Ego and astral body of man when with the help of Spiritual Science we penetrate into what takes place on and around the Earth over and above the physical and etheric forces and activities.

To begin with, we turn our gaze upon the plant-world. Speaking in the general sense and leaving out of account evergreen trees and the like—we see the plant-world sprouting out of the Earth in spring. We see the plants becoming richer and richer in color, more luxuriant, and then in autumn fading away again. In a certain sense we see them disappear from the Earth when the Earth is covered with snow.

But that is only one aspect of the unfolding of the plant-world. Physical knowledge tells us that this unfolding of the plant-world in spring and its fading towards autumn is connected with the Sun, also that, for example, the green coloring of the plants can be produced only under the influence of sunlight. Physical knowledge, therefore, shows us what comes about in the realm of physical effects; but it does not show us that while all the budding, the blossoming and withering of the plants is going on, spiritual events are also taking place. In reality, just as in the physical human organism there is for example the circulation of the blood, just as etheric processes express themselves in the physical organism as vascular action and so forth, and just as this physical organism is permeated by the soul and spirit, so also the processes of sprouting, greening, blossoming and fading of the plants which we regard as physical processes, are everywhere permeated by workings of the cosmic world of soul and spirit.

Now when we look into the countenance of a man and his glance falls on us, when we see his expression, maybe the flushing of the face, then indeed the eyes of our soul are looking right through the physical to the soul and spirit. Indeed, it cannot be otherwise in our life among our fellow-men. In like manner we must accustom ourselves also to see spirit-and-soul in the physiognomy—if I may call it so—and changing coloring of the plant-world on our Earth.

If we are only willing to recognize the physical, we say that the Sun's warmth and light work upon the plants, forming in them the saps, the chlorophyll and so forth. But if we contemplate all this with spiritual insight, if we take the same attitude to this plant-physiognomy of the Earth as we are accustomed to take to the human physiognomy, then something unveils itself to us that I should like to express with a particular word, because this word actually conveys the reality.

The Sun, of which we say, outwardly speaking, that it sends its light to the Earth, is not merely a radiant globe of gas but infinitely more than that. It sends its rays down to the Earth but whenever we look at the Sun it is the outer side of the rays that we see. The rays have, however, an inner side. If someone were able to look through the Sun's light, to regard the light only as an outer husk and look through to the soul of it, he would behold the Soul-Power, the Soul-Being of the Sun. With ordinary human consciousness we see the Sun as we should see a man who was made of papier-maché. An effigy in which there is nothing but the form, the lifeless form, is of course something different from the human being we actually see before us. In the case of the living human being, we see through this outer form and perceive soul-and-spirit. For ordinary consciousness the Sun is changed as it were into a papier-maché cast. We do not see through its outer husk that is woven of Light.

But if we were able to see through this, we should see the soul-and-spirit essence of the Sun. We can be conscious of its activity just as we are conscious of the physical papier-maché husk of the Sun. From the standpoint of physical knowledge we say: ‘The Sun shines upon the Earth; it sparkles upon the stones, upon the soil. The light is thrown back and thereby we see everything that is mineral. The rays of the Sun penetrate into the plants, making them green, making them bud.’—All that is external. If we see the soul-and-spirit essence of the Sun, we cannot merely say: ‘The sunlight sparkles on the minerals, is reflected, enabling us to see the minerals,’ or, ‘The light and heat of the Sun penetrate into the plants, making them verdant’—but we shall have to say, meaning now the countless spiritual Beings who people the Sun and who constitute its soul and spirit: ‘The Sun dreams and its dreams envelop the Earth and fashion the plants.’

If you picture the surface of the Earth with the physical plants growing from it, coming to blossom, you have there the working of the physical rays of the Sun. But above it is the weaving life of the dream-world of the Sun—a world of pure Imaginations. And one can say: When the mantle of snow melts in the spring, the Sun regains its power, then the Sun-Imaginations weave anew around the Earth. These Imaginations of the Sun are Imaginative forces, playing in upon the world of plants. Now although it is true that this Imaginative world—this Imaginative atmosphere surrounding the Earth—is very specially active from spring until autumn in any given region of the Earth, nevertheless this dreamlike character of the Sun's activity is also present in a certain way during the time of winter. Only during winter the dreams are, as it were, dull and brooding, whereas in summer they are mobile, creative, formative. Now it is in this element in which the Sun-Imaginations unfold that the Ego and astral body of man live and weave when they are outside the physical and etheric bodies.

You will realize from what I have said that sleep in summer is actually quite a different matter from sleep in winter, although in the present state of evolution, man's life and consciousness are so dull and lacking in vitality that these things go unperceived. In earlier times men distinguished very definitely through their feelings between winter-sleep and summer-sleep, and they knew too what meaning winter-sleep and summer-sleep had for them. In those ancient times men knew that of summer-sleep they could say: During the summer the Earth is enveloped by picture-thoughts. And they expressed this by saying: The Upper Gods come down during the summer and hover around the Earth; during the winter the Lower Gods ascend out of the Earth and hover around it.—This Imaginative world, differently constituted in winter and in summer, was conceived as the weaving of the Upper and the Lower Gods. But in those olden times it was also known that man himself, with his Ego and his astral body, lives in this world of weaving Imaginations.

Now the very truths of which I have here spoken, show us, if we ponder them in the light of Spiritual Science, in what connection man stands, even during his earthly existence, with the extra-earthly Universe. You see, in summer—when it is summer in any region of the Earth—the human being during his sleep is always woven around by a sharply contoured world of Cosmic Imaginations. The result is that during the time of summer he is, so to speak, pressed near to the Earth with his soul and spirit. During the time of winter it is different. During winter the contours, the meshes, of the Cosmic Imaginations widen out, as it were. During the summer we live with our Ego and astral body while we are asleep within very clearly defined Imaginations, within manifold figures and forms. During winter the figures around the Earth are wide-meshed and the consequence of this is that whenever autumn begins, that which lives in our Ego and astral body is borne far out into the Universe by night. During summer and its heat, that which lives in our Ego and astral body remains more, so to speak, in the psycho-spiritual atmosphere of the human world. During winter this same content is borne out into the far distances of the Universe. Indeed without speaking figuratively, since one is saying something that is quite real, one can say: that which man cultivates in himself, in his soul, and which through his Ego and astral body he can draw out from his physical and etheric bodies between the times of going to sleep and waking—that stores itself up during the summer and streams out during winter into the wide expanse of the Cosmos.

Now we cannot conceive that we men shut ourselves away, as it were, in earthly existence and that the wide Universe knows nothing of us. It is far from being so. True, at the time of Midsummer man can conceal himself from the Spirits of the Universe, and he may also succeed in harboring reprehensible feelings of evil. The dense net of Imaginations does not let these feelings through; they still remain. And at Christmastime the Gods look in upon the Earth and everything that lives in man's nature is revealed and goes forth with his Ego and astral being. Using a picture which truly represents the facts, we may say: In winter the windows of the Earth open and the Angels and Archangels behold what men actually are on the Earth.

We on Earth have gradually accustomed ourselves in modern civilization to express all that we allow to pass as knowledge in humdrum, dry, unpoetic phrases. The higher Beings are ever poets, therefore we never give a true impression of their nature if we describe it in barren physical words; we must resort to words such as I have just now used: at Christmastime the Earth's windows open and through these windows the Angels and Archangels behold what men's deeds have been the whole year through. The Beings of the higher Hierarchies are poets and artists even in their thinking. The logic we are generally at pains to apply is only an outcome of the Earth's gravity—by which I do not at all imply that it is not highly useful on Earth.

It is what lives in the minds and hearts of men as I have just pictured it, that is of essential interest to these higher Beings; the Angels who look in through the Christmas windows are not interested in the speculations of professors; they overlook them. Nor, to begin with, are they much concerned with a man's thoughts. It is what goes on in his feelings, in his heart, that in its cosmic aspect is connected with the Sun's yearly course. So it is not so much whether we are foolish or clever on Earth that comes before the gaze of the Divine-Spiritual Beings at the time of Christmas, but simply whether we are good or evil men, whether we feel for others or are egoists. That is what is communicated to the cosmic worlds through the course of the yearly seasons.

You may believe that our thoughts remain near the Earth, because I have said that the Angels and Archangels are not concerned with them when they look in through the Christmas windows. They are not concerned with our thoughts because, if I may use a rather prosaic figure of speech, they receive the richer coinage, the more valuable coinage that is minted by the soul-and-spirit of man. And this more valuable coinage is minted by the heart, the feelings, by what a man is worth because of what his heart and feeling contain. For the Cosmos, our thoughts are only the small change, the lesser coinage, and this lesser coinage is spied out by subordinate spiritual beings every night. Whether we are foolish or clever is spied out for the Cosmos every night—not indeed for the very far regions of the Cosmos but only for the regions around the Earth—spied out by beings who are closest to the Earth in its environment and therefore the most subordinate in rank. The daily revolution of the Sun takes place in order to impart to the Cosmos the worth of our thoughts. Thus far do our thoughts extend; they belong merely to the environment of the Earth. The yearly revolution of the Sun takes place in order to carry our heart-nature, our feeling-nature, farther out into the cosmic worlds.

Our will-nature cannot be carried in this way out into the Cosmos, for the cycle of the day is strictly regulated. It runs its course in twenty-four hours. The yearly course of the Sun is strictly regulated too. We perceive the regularity of the daily cycle in the strictly logical sequences of our thoughts. The regularity of the yearly cycle—we perceive the after-effect of this in our heart and soul, in that there are certain feelings which say to one thing that a man does: it is good, and to another: it is bad.

But there is a third faculty in man, namely, the will. True, the will is bound up with feeling, and feeling cannot but say that certain actions are morally good, and others morally not good. But the will can do what is morally good and also what is morally not good. Here, then, there is no strict regularity. The relation of our will to our nature as human beings is not strictly regulated in the sense that thinking and feeling are regulated. We cannot call a bad action good, or a good action bad, nor can we call a logical thought illogical, an illogical thought logical. This is due to the fact that our thoughts stand under the influence of the daily revolution of the Sun, our feelings under the influence of its yearly revolution. The will, however, is left in the hands of humanity itself on Earth. And now a man might say: ‘The most that happens to me is that if I think illogically, my illogical thoughts are carried out every night into the Cosmos and do mischief there—but what does that matter to me? I am not here to bring order into the Cosmos.’—Here on Earth, where his life is lived in illusion, a man might in certain circumstances speak like this, but between death and a new birth he would never do so. For between death and a new birth he himself is in the worlds in which he may have caused mischief through his foolish thoughts; and he must live through all the harm that he has done. So, too, between death and a new birth, he is in those worlds into which his feelings have flowed. But here again he might say on Earth: ‘What lives in my feelings evaporates into the Cosmos; but I leave it to the Gods to deal with any harm that may have been caused there through me. My will, however, is not bound on Earth by any regulation.’—

The materialist who considers that man's life is limited to the time between birth and death, can never conceive that his will has any cosmic significance; neither can he conceive that human thoughts or feelings have any meaning for the Cosmos. But even one who knows quite well that thoughts have a cosmic significance as the result of the daily revolution of the Sun, and feelings through the yearly revolution—even he, when he sees what is accomplished on the Earth by the good or evil will-impulses of man, must turn away from the Cosmos and to human nature itself in order to see how what works in man's will goes out into the Cosmos. For what works in man's will must be borne out into the Cosmos by man himself, and he bears it out when he passes through the gate of death. Therefore it is not through the daily or the yearly cycles but through the gate of death that man carries forth the good or the evil he has brought about here on Earth through his will.

It is a strange relationship that man has to the Cosmos in his life of soul. We say of our thoughts: ‘We have thoughts but they are not subject to our arbitrary will; we must conform to the laws of the Universe when we think, otherwise we shall come into conflict with everything that goes on in the world.’—If a little child is standing in front of me, and I think: That is an old man—I may flatter myself that I have determined the thought, but I am certainly out of touch with the world. Thus in respect of our thoughts we are by no means independent, so little independent that our thoughts are carried out into the Cosmos by the daily cycle of the Sun. Nor are we independent in our life of feelings, for they are carried out through the yearly cycle of the Sun. Thus even during earthly life, that which lives in our head through our thoughts and, through our feelings in our breast, does not live only within us but also partakes in a cosmic existence. That alone which lives in our will we keep with us until our death. Then, when we have laid aside the body, when we have no longer anything to do with earthly forces, we bear it forth with us through the gate of death.

Man passes through the gate of death laden with what has come out of his acts of will. Just as here on Earth he has around him all that lives in minerals, plants, animals and in physical humanity, all that lives in clouds, streams, mountains, stars, in so far as they are externally visible through the light—just as he has all this around him during his existence between birth and death, so he has a world around him when he has laid aside the physical and etheric bodies and has passed through the gate of death. In truth he has around him the very world into which his thoughts have entered every night, into which his feelings have entered with the fulfilment of every yearly cycle ... “That thou hast thought; that thou hast felt.” ... It now seems to him as though the Beings of the Hierarchies were bearing his thoughts and his feelings towards him. They have perceived it all, as I have indicated. His mental life and his feeling-life now stream towards him.

In earthly existence the Sun gives light from morning to evening; it goes down and night sets in. When we have passed through the gate of death, our wisdom rays out towards us as day; through our accumulated acts of folly, the spiritual lights grow dark and dim around us and it becomes night. Here on Earth we have day and night; when we have passed through the gate of death, we have as day and night the results of our wisdom and our foolishness. And what man experiences here on this Earth as spring, summer, autumn and winter in the yearly cycle, as changing temperatures and other sentient experiences, of all this he becomes aware—when he has passed through the gate of death—also as a kind of cycle, although of much longer duration. He experiences the warmth-giving, life-giving quality (life-giving, that is to say, for his spiritual Self) of his good feelings, of his sympathy with goodness; he experiences as icy cold his sympathy with evil, with the immoral. Just as here on Earth we live through the heat of summer and the cold of winter, so do we live after death warmed by our good feelings, chilled by our evil feelings; and we bear the effects of our will through these spiritual years and days. After death we are the product of our moral nature on Earth. And we have an environment that is permeated by our follies and our wisdom, by our sympathies and antipathies for the good.

So that we can say: Just as here on Earth we have the summer air around us giving warmth and life, and as we have the cold and frosty winter air around us, so, after death, we are surrounded by an atmosphere of soul-and-spirit that is warm and life-giving in so far as it is produced through our good feelings, and chilling in so far as it is produced through our evil feelings. Here on Earth, in certain regions at least, the summer and winter temperatures are the same for all of us. In the time after death, each human being has his own atmosphere, engendered by himself. And the most moving experiences after death are connected with the fact that one man lives in icy cold and the other, close beside him, in life-giving warmth.

Such are the experiences that may be undergone after death. And as I described in my book Theosophy, one of the main experiences passed through in the soul-world, is that those human beings who have harbored evil feelings here on Earth, must undergo their hard experiences in the sight of those who developed and harbored good feelings.

It can indeed be said: All that remains concealed to begin with in the inner being of man, discloses itself when he has passed through the gate of death. Sleep too acquires a cosmic significance, likewise our life during wintertime. We sleep every night in order that we may prepare for ourselves the light in which we must live after death. We go through our winter experiences in order to prepare the soul-spiritual warmth into which we enter after death. And into this atmosphere of the spiritual world which we have ourselves prepared we bear the effects of our deeds.

Here on Earth we live, through our physical body, as beings subject to earthly gravity. Through our breathing we live in the surrounding air, and far away we see the stars. When we have passed through the gate of death we are in the world of spirit-and-soul, far removed from the Earth; we are beyond the stars, we see the stars from the other side, look back to the world of stars. Our very being lives in the cosmic thoughts and cosmic forces. We look back upon the stars, no longer seeing them shine, but seeing instead the Hierarchies, the Spiritual Beings who have merely their reflection in the stars.

Thus man on Earth can gain more and more knowledge of what the nature of his life will be when he passes through the gate of death. There are people who say: ‘Why do I need to know all this? I shall surely see it all after death!’—That attitude is just as if a man were to doubt the value of eyesight. For as the Earth's evolution takes its course, man enters more and more into a life in which he must acquire the power to partake in these after-death experiences by grasping them, to begin with in thought, here on the Earth. To shut out knowledge of the spiritual worlds while we are on the Earth is to blind ourselves in soul and spirit after death. A man will enter the spiritual world as a cripple when he passes through the gate of death, if here, in this world, he disdains to learn about the world of spirit, for humanity is evolving towards freedom—towards free spiritual activity. This fact should become clearer and clearer to mankind and should make men realize the urgent necessity of gaining knowledge about the spiritual world.

In the course of our present studies I should like it to become increasingly clear that man does not belong to the Earth alone, to Earth-existence alone, but also to the Cosmos, to the world of Stars. Much of what there is to say in this connection I have, as you know, already said. I want now to begin with a brief remark in order that misunderstandings may be avoided.

Anyone who speaks of man's connection with the world of the Stars is probably always liable to be accused of leanings towards the superficial form of Astrology that is so widely pursued nowadays. But if what is said on this subject is rightly understood, the immense difference will at once be apparent between what is meant here and the amateurish interpretations of ancient astrological traditions that are so common today.

When we say that man, between birth and death, is a being connected with the Earth and earthly happenings, what do we mean by this? We mean that man owes his existence between birth and death to the fact that, in the first place, he takes the substances of the Earth into his metabolic system as nourishment and digests them; further, that through his breathing, and through the inner processes connected with his breathing, he is related in still another way to the Earth—that is to say, to the atmosphere surrounding the the Earth. We also say that man perceives the outer things of the Earth by means of his senses, perceives indeed reflections of what is extra-terrestrial—reflections which are, however, of a much more earthly character than is generally supposed. So that in general one can say: Man partakes of earthly existence through his senses, through his rhythmic system, and through his metabolic system, and has within him the continuation of the processes set in operation through this Earth-existence itself.

But equally there takes place in man a continuation of cosmic, extra-terrestrial processes. Only it must not be supposed, when it is said that an influence from the Moon, or Venus, or Mars, is exercised upon man, that this is to be understood merely as if rays of light are sent down from Mars or Venus or the Moon, and permeate him. When, for instance, it is said that man is subject to the influence of the Moon, this must be taken as an analogy of what is meant by saying that man is subject to the influences of the substances of the Earth. When someone passes an apple-tree, let us say, picks an apple and eats it, it can be said that the apple-tree has an influence on him; but we should not construe this so literally as to say that the apple-tree had sent its rays towards him. Or, if you like, when a man passes a meadow where there is an ox, and a week afterwards eats its flesh, we shall not at once form the idea that the ox has exercised an influence upon him. Neither must we picture so literally what is said about the influence upon man of the world of the Stars. The relation of the world of the Stars to man and of man to the world of the Stars is for all that just as much a reality as the relation of the man to the ox he passes in the meadow and the flesh of which he afterwards eats.

Today I have to speak of certain connections which exist between man and the worlds both of Earth-existence and of extra-earthly existence. If we again turn our attention to how man lives in the alternating conditions of waking and sleeping, we must first be clear that it is in the waking state that his reciprocal relationship to earthly substances and earthly forces is actually established. During waking life he perceives through his senses; during sleep he does not. Moreover he eats and drinks only when awake—though possibly some people would like to do so in sleep as well! The breathing process and the process that is connected with the breathing, i.e. the circulation of the blood, as well as the other rhythmic processes—these alone continue in man both in the waking and sleeping states. But they differ in the two states. I will speak later of the difference there is between breathing during waking life and breathing during sleep. To begin with we will confine ourselves to the fact that man is related to the outer world during the waking state through his senses and through his metabolism. We will consider this at first in connection only with things that are common knowledge.

Let us then start from the fact that during his waking state man takes foodstuffs into himself from the outside world, inner activity being promoted by the process of digestion. But it must not be forgotten that while, in the waking state, after the food has been taken, inner physical and etheric activity proceeds under the influence of the intaken foodstuffs, this physical and etheric organism of man is permeated by his Ego-organization and astral body.

It is also the case that during the waking state, man's Ego and astral ‘being’ take command of what goes on in the physical and etheric bodies in connection with the process of nourishment. But what thus takes place under the influence of the Ego and astral being does not continue during sleep. During sleep the physical and etheric bodies of man are worked upon by forces that issue, not from the Earth but from the cosmic environment of the Earth—from the world of the Stars.

It might be said—and not in a figurative sense for it has real meaning—that by day man eats the substances of the Earth and by night takes into himself what the Stars and their activities give him. In a certain sense, therefore, man is bound up with the Earth while he is awake and removed from the Earth while he is asleep; heavenly processes take their course in his physical and etheric bodies during sleep.

Materialistic science thinks that when a man is asleep, the substances he has consumed simply activate their own forces in him, whereas in reality, whatever substances a man takes into himself are worked upon during his sleep by the cosmic forces in the environment of the Earth. Suppose, for instance, we consume white of egg—albumen. This albumen is only fettered to the Earth through the fact that during the waking state we are permeated by our soul and spirit—our astral body and Ego. During sleep this albumen is worked upon by the whole planetary system from Moon to Saturn, and by the world of the fixed Stars. And a chemist who wished to study the inner processes taking place in man during sleep would have not only to be versed in earthly chemistry but also in a spiritual chemistry, for the processes then are different from those that take their course during waking life.

The Ego and astral being of man are, as you know, separated from the physical and etheric bodies during sleep and are not directly related with the world of the Stars; but they are directly related with the Beings of whom the Sun, Moon and Stars are the physical mirror-images—namely, with the Beings of the Hierarchies. Man asleep is a duality; his Ego and astral body—I could equally well say, his spirit and soul—become subject to the spiritual Beings of the higher kingdoms of the Universe. His bodies, the physical and etheric bodies, are subject to the physical reflections, the cosmic-physical mirror-images of these higher Beings.

Aware of himself as an earthly being, man has become more and more a materialistic philistine under the influence of intellectualism. Almost as aptly as the modern age is called the epoch of intellectual and scientific progress, it could be called the epoch of materialistic philistinism. For man is not conscious that he is dependent on anything else than sense-impressions coming from the Earth, the rhythmic processes set going in him by earthly processes, the metabolic processes also occasioned in him by earthly conditions. Hence he does not know his real place in the Universe. The factors in operation here are of tremendous complexity. As soon as the veil that is spread before man in order that he may see only the sense-world and not the spiritual world behind it, is drawn aside, life becomes extraordinarily complex.

It is found to begin with that man is influenced not only by those Beings and their physical reflections, the Stars, which can be directly observed, but that within earthly existence itself, supersensible Beings akin to those of the world of Stars have so to speak set up their abode in the earthly realm.

You know that the people of the Old Testament worshipped Jehovah—who was an actual Being, connected with what manifests in the physical world as Moon. It is of course more or less a figure of speech to say that the Jehovah-Being has his dwelling in the Moon, but at the same time there is reality in the expression. Everything pertaining to this Jehovah-Being is connected with the Moon.

Now there are Beings who ‘scorned’—if I may so express it—to make the journey to the Moon with the Jehovah-beings when the Moon separated from the Earth, and who remained in the earthly realm. So that in a way we can divine the existence of the true Jehovah-beings when we look at the Moon. We can say: that is the outer physical image of everything that participates in a regular way in the World Order in connection with the Being known as Jehovah. But when we learn to know what takes place inside the surface of the Earth—whether in the solid or the watery states—we find beings there who have disdained to make their home on the Moon, and have in an irregular way made the Earth their dwelling-place.

Now the Moon-beings, as I will call them, have helpers. These helpers belong to Mercury and Venus, just as the Moon-beings belong to the Moon. The Venus-beings, the Mercury-beings and the Moon-beings form a kind of trinity. The so-called regular beings of this kind in the Universe belong to these Stars. But both in the solid and the watery constituents of the Earth, we find beings belonging, it is true, to the same category, but—one might say—to a different epoch of time. They are beings who did not share in the Earth's cosmic evolution.

These beings have an influence upon sleeping man just as the regular cosmic beings have; but their influence is pernicious. I must characterize it by saying: when a man goes to sleep, then in the condition between falling asleep and waking, these irregular Moon, Venus and Mercury-beings approach him and set about persuading him that evil is good and good evil. All this takes place in man's unconscious condition, between going to sleep and waking.

It is a shattering experience connected with initiation that beyond the threshold of ordinary consciousness things by no means without danger to humanity are encountered. People holding the materialistic view of life have no idea to what man is exposed between going to sleep and waking. He is actually exposed to these beings who persuade him in his sleeping state that good is evil, and evil good. The moral order on Earth is bound up with the human etheric body, and when man sleeps, he leaves his moral achievements behind him on the bed. He does not pass over into the state of sleep armed with his moral qualities.

Natural Science today is everywhere touching the fringe of things which need to be explained by Spiritual Science. You may recently have seen in the newspapers some interesting and thoroughly well-founded statistics. It was stated that criminals in the prisons have been found to have the soundest sleep of all. Really hardened criminals are never tormented during their sleep by bad dreams or the like. This only happens when they dip down again into their etheric bodies, for it is there that the moral qualities lie. It can much more easily happen to one who is striving to be moral, that through the constitution of his etheric body, he carries over something into his astral body and is then tormented by dreams as the result of comparatively trifling moral lapses. But generally speaking it is a fact that man does not carry over at all, or only to a very slight extent, the moral constitution he acquires during earthly existence but is exposed during sleep to the beings just referred to.

These beings are identical with those I have always designated as Ahrimanic. They set themselves the task of keeping man on the Earth by every possible means. You know from the book Occult Science that the Earth will one day pass over into the Jupiter condition. That is what these beings want to prevent. They want to prevent man from developing in a regular way together with the Earth and then passing over into the Jupiter condition in a normal way. They want to preserve the Earth as Earth and mankind for the Earth. Hence these beings work unceasingly and with great intensity to achieve the following.—You must remember that these are things that take place behind the scenes of existence—real processes that have been going on ever since there has been a human race on the Earth.—Man passes into the state of sleep in his Ego-being and astral-being. These Moon, Venus and Mercury-beings who are living unlawfully on the Earth, now endeavor to give man an etheric body composed of the Earth's ether whenever he is asleep. They hardly ever succeed. In rare cases of which I will speak at some later time, they have succeeded; but this hardly ever happens. Still they do not give up the attempt for over and over again it seems to them that their efforts might succeed, that they might surround, permeate a man while he is asleep and has left his etheric body behind, with another etheric body built up from the Earth's ether. That is what these beings desire.

If an Ahrimanic being of this category were actually to succeed in bringing a complete etheric body stage by stage into a man every time he slept, such a man would be able after death, when living in his etheric body, to maintain himself in that body. Otherwise, as you know, the etheric body dissolves in a few days. But a man to whom the above had happened would be able to continue existing in his etheric body and after a time there would arise a race of etheric humanity. That is what is desired from this side of the spiritual world, and then it would be possible by such means to preserve the Earth.

Within the solid and the fluid components of the Earth there are in very truth a host of such beings. Their desire is to make mankind into pure phantoms, etheric phantoms, until the end of the Earth's evolution, so that the normal goal of Earth-evolution could not be attained. And in the night-time these beings by no means lose courage; over and over again they believe that their efforts may succeed.

Now man today has quite a passably good intellect which has developed considerably at the present time when philistinism is on the increase. Man can certainly pride himself upon possessing intellect. But this intellect is not even remotely on a par with the intellect of those higher beings who desire to achieve what I am now describing to you. Let nobody say: ‘These beings must be fearfully stupid.’ They are certainly not stupid. Seeing that they work only upon human beings in sleep, there is nothing to deter them from believing that they might succeed before the end of Earth-evolution in preventing a large portion of the human race from reaching their future destinations—destinations bound up with the Jupiter embodiment of the Earth.

But one who is able to see behind the scenes of physical existence can perceive that these beings do sometimes lose courage, are disappointed. And the disappointments they experience are not experienced in the night, but by day. One sees, for instance, how these Ahrimanic beings suffer disappointments if one comes across them in hospitals.

Now of course the illnesses that befall men have one aspect that calls upon us in all circumstances to do everything we possibly can to heal them. But on the other side we must ask: how do the illnesses suffered by men arise out of the dark sources of natural existence?

Those illnesses which are not the result of external influences but arise out of the inner constitution of man, are connected with the fact that when the Ahrimanic beings have almost succeeded in making a man assume an etheric body that is not his normal one, then, instead of bringing the lawful working of the etheric forces into his physical body and into his own accustomed etheric body on waking, such a man bears into himself causes of illness. Through these causes of illness the true Venus, Mercury and Moon-beings protect themselves against the harmful influences of the irregular beings. Indeed if a man did not at some time or another get this or that illness, he would be liable to the danger of which I have just spoken. In any illness his body breaks down, collapses, in order that there can be ‘sweated out,’ if I may use the expression, whatever irregular etheric processes he has taken into himself through the Ahrimanic influences.

And a further reaction called forth in order to prevent man from falling a victim to this Ahrimanic influence, is the possibility of error. And a third thing is egoism. Man is not fundamentally intended to be ill, to fall a prey to error, or to be egoistic to an exaggerated degree. Egoism as such is again a means of holding man to the evolution proper to the Earth instead of being torn out of it by the Ahrimanic beings. This, then, is one order of beings which can be discovered behind the scenes of ordinary sense-existence.

One can form an idea of another order of beings by knowing that not only Moon, Mercury, and Venus have an influence upon man but that an influence is also exercised from beyond the Sun—from Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.

You know from the lectures I gave in the so-called ‘French Course’^NoteNum that the Moon is the physical reflection of those beings who bring man into the physical world. Saturn is the physical reflection of those beings who bear him again out of the physical world. The Moon draws man down to the Earth; Saturn draws him again into the Universe and then into the spiritual world.

Just as the Jehovah-Moon-God has Venus and Mercury-beings as helpers, so Saturn has Jupiter and Mars-beings as helpers in bearing man into the Cosmos and into the spiritual worlds. These influences and the influences connected with the Moon-beings work upon man in exactly the opposite way.

The influences of Moon, Venus, and Mercury upon us are predominant until our 17th or 18th years. Then later on, when we have passed our 20th or 21st year, an influence from Mars, Jupiter and Saturn becomes particularly active; only in later years does this come to the point of leading us out of earthly existence into the spiritual world. The inner constitution of man is, in fact, dependent upon this transition, as one might say, from the inner planets to the outer planets. Until our 17th or 18th years, we are dependent, for instance, upon the major blood-circulation which affects the whole body. Later in life we are dependent upon the minor blood-circulation—but these are matters which must be left for future lectures. At the moment we must pay attention to the fact that just as the irregular beings of Moon, Venus, and Mercury have their habitations in the solid and fluidic components of the Earth, so the irregular beings of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn have the conditions for their existence—or, to speak pictorially, their habitations—in the warmth and in the air surrounding the Earth.

These beings have a great influence upon man during his sleeping state. But their influence works in exactly the opposite direction. The aim of these beings is to make man into a moral automaton—if I may so express it—into a moral automaton of such a nature that in his waking state he would not listen to his own instincts, his desires, or the voice of his blood, but would spurn all this and hearken only to the inspiration of these irregular Mars-, Jupiter-, and Saturn-beings. He would then become a moral automaton, without any prospect of a future state of freedom. That, then, is what these beings desire; and their influence too is strong, exceedingly strong. It is they who every night want to induce man to take the influence of the world of Stars into himself and never again the influence of the Earth. They would fain carry man right away from earthly existence. They desire—and have desired this ever since the human race first arose on the Earth—that man shall spurn the Earth, that he shall not awaken to freedom on the Earth—where alone this is possible. They desire that he shall remain a moral automaton as he was in the preceding metamorphosis of the Earth, in the Old Moon.

And in the middle, between these two hosts, of which the one sets its camp in the element of warmth and that of air, and the other in the elements of earth and of water—between these two opposing cosmic hosts stands Man. Life in his physical body conceals from him the fact that a fierce battle is waged in the Cosmos for possession of his being.

Today man must consciously find his way to such knowledge for it concerns him deeply and essentially. His very existence as a human being is constituted by the fact that forces are everywhere active around him, forces from the spiritual world. It is important for man today to have knowledge of his real position in the Universe.

A time will come when people will be far more justified in holding a poor opinion of our dark, materialistic knowledge compared with what will be known in the future about the spiritual reality behind the physical, than we are justified in saying that the scientific knowledge possessed by the Greeks was puerile, that they were mere children, whereas we have made splendid progress! In philistinism we certainly have made splendid progress and we shall have much more right to criticise when we can speak with full knowledge of this battle that is waging on the Earth for possession of man's being.

There are signs that a knowledge of these things must begin to spread in our time. It is certainly true that what I have told you today about the battle of the Ahrimanic and Luciferic beings in the Cosmos for the being of man is still hidden from the majority of people in the dark recesses of their inner nature. But these battles are now beginning to send their waves into that realm of existence of which men are clearly conscious. And today, if we are not to lead a sleepy existence in our civilization, we must know how to recognize the first waves that beat in upon us from those regions of the spiritual world which I have just characterized.

These two hosts—the Luciferic in the warmth and airy element of the Earth, the Ahrimanic in the solid and watery—these two hosts send their waves into our cultural life today. The Luciferic hosts are making their influence felt above all in outworn theology. In our cultural life, as an outflow of this Luciferic power, we encounter statements endeavoring to make Christ into a myth. The Christ descended to the Earth through the Mystery of Golgotha as a real Being, and that is naturally a truth that cuts right across the intentions of the beings who would like to make man into a moral automaton, without freedom. Therefore: Do away with the reality of Christ. Christ is a myth! You can discover in the literature of the 19th century, how clever and ingenious were the hypotheses of theologians like David Frederic Strauss, Kalthoff and those who merely echoed them, or better said, apish babblers like Arthur Drews! Everywhere the view is advanced that Christ is a mythological figure, a mere picture which has impressed itself upon man's imagination.—There will be many more attacks from these hosts—but this is the first.

The first waves coming from the Ahrimanic host in the solid and watery elements of the Earth press home the opposite view. In this case, Christ is denied and validity allowed only to the ‘simple man of Nazareth,’ to Jesus as the physical personality. Here again is a tit-bit presented by theology!

Making Christ into a myth—a purely Luciferic activity. Making the One who went through the Mystery of Golgotha into a mere man—even if endowed with every possible quality—a purely Ahrimanic activity. This, however, does not succeed at all easily, for the many testimonies and traditions have to be eliminated before producing this ‘simple man of Nazareth.’ Nevertheless this other tit-bit of theology is evidence of the onrush of the Ahrimanic breakers into human culture.

If these things are to be rightly assessed we must be able also to detect them behind the scenes of our ordinary existence on Earth. Otherwise, if men are not willing to turn their attention to what can be said today out of the spiritual world, they will become less and less able to judge such phenomena correctly, and these phenomena will then take effect in the sub-consciousness. It will become increasingly dangerous for men to surrender to the subconscious. Clear, thoughtful observation of what actually exists—a feeling for reality—that is the growing need of humanity.

Perhaps we can trace most definitely where this clear thoughtfulness, this sense of reality, must be applied, when we perceive the increase of such extraordinary phenomena as the theology which on the one hand denies Christ, and on the other hand makes Christ a myth. Such phenomena will become more and more prevalent, and if they are not to lead to corruption, humanity must acquire a clear, unswerving perception of the spiritual influences that are exercised upon the physical world, and particularly upon man himself.

I told you once before of the two men who found a piece of iron bent into a certain shape. The one said: “A good horse-shoe! I will shoe my horse with it.” The other said: “Not at all. It is a magnet and can be used for quite different purposes than shoeing a horse!” “I see nothing like a magnet about it,” said the other man. “You are crazy to say that there are invisible magnetic forces in it. It's a horse-shoe—that's its use!”

This is rather like the people today who are not willing to receive the knowledge that comes from the spiritual world. They want to “shoe horses” with everything in the world—if I may so express myself—because they will not acknowledge the reality of the supersensible forces. They want to shoe horses—not to make anything in which the magnetic forces are put to use. There was once a time—nor does it lie very far behind us—when a piece of iron so shaped would have been used for the shoeing of horses. But today this is no longer possible.

A time will come when in ordinary social life too, men will need what can be communicated from the spiritual world. Of this we must be mindful, and then Anthroposophy will penetrate not only into the intellect—that is of less importance—but above all into the will—and that is of great importance. Upon this we will ponder more and more deeply.

• NoteNum. Printed under the title: Philosophy, Cosmology and Religion. An abbreviated version of ten lectures given by Dr. Steiner in Dornach, 6th-15th September, 1922.

Let us recall what I have been telling you about man's experiences between death and a new birth. The various descriptions have enabled us to realize that this life—above all in its main period, about the middle of the time between death and rebirth—is such that man lives in communion with the Beings referred to in the book Occult Science as the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies. This life of man in communion with those higher Beings is comparable with the life he has here, when in the physical body, in communion with the beings of the three kingdoms of Nature. Basically speaking, everything in his earthly environment belongs to one of the three kingdoms of Nature—to the mineral or the plant or the animal kingdom, or indeed the physical human kingdom, which in this particular connection can be taken as belonging to the animal kingdom.

Man has his senses, and through his sense-impressions he lives in communion with the beings of the three kingdoms of Nature. What unfolds in his life of feeling between birth and death, in so far as it is the outcome of experiences arising from his environment, is also related to these three kingdoms of Nature. The same applies to what comes from the will, namely, human action. Thus between birth and death man is interwoven with what his senses convey to him from the three kingdoms of Nature.

In like manner between death and a new birth, in the time indicated above, man lives within the higher realms, among the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies. This life together with the Beings of the Hierarchies is, in reality, all action, perpetual activity. We have heard how the spirit-seed of the physical body is produced in cooperation with these higher Beings. Here on Earth, when we perceive or connect ourselves with the entities belonging to the three kingdoms of Nature, we feel outside them. But there is a condition between death and a new birth when we find ourselves wholly within the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies; we are entirely given up to them. That is one of the conditions in which we then live.—Let us picture it clearly.—Here on the Earth, when, for example, we pick a flower, the fact is correctly described by saying, ‘I pick the flower.’ But if this way of speaking were applied to our life together with the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies, the facts would not then be correctly expressed. When we do something in connection with these Beings, we must say: the other Being acts in us. Thus we are in a condition which compels us all the time not to call the activity—in which of course we ourselves partake—our own activity, but the activity of the Beings of the Hierarchies in us. We have in very truth a cosmic consciousness. Just as here we feel heart, lungs and so on, to be within us, so do we then feel the world to be within us, but it is the world of the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies. Everything that takes place is the outcome of an activity in which we, too, are involved; but to describe the facts correctly we should have to say: such and such a Being of the Higher Hierarchies is acting in us.

Now the condition thus described is only one of the conditions obtaining between death and a new birth. We could not be men in the true sense if we lived in this one condition only. In the spiritual world between death and rebirth we should no more be able to bear this condition only, than here on Earth we could bear inbreathing without exhaling. The condition I have just described must alternate with another, which consists in our obliterating through our cosmic consciousness all thinking and feeling about the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies, obliterating too all will that works in this way in us from the Beings of the Hierarchies.

Thus we may say that there are times during the life between death and a new birth when we find ourselves filled through and through with the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies and their radiance. We feel them within ourselves. But there is another condition, in which we have first suppressed and then obliterated altogether, this consciousness of the Higher Beings manifesting in us. Then—to use earthly terms—we are ‘out of our body’—the condition is of course entirely spiritual but let us put it in this way: we are out of our body. In this condition we know nothing of the world that lives within us, but we have as it were ‘come to ourselves.’ We no longer live in the other Beings of the Hierarchies but we live wholly in ourselves. Between death and a new birth, we should never have consciousness of ourselves if we lived only in the one condition. Just as here on Earth, inbreathing must alternate with out-breathing, or sleeping with waking life, so between death and a new birth there must be rhythmic alternation between the inner experience of the whole world of the Hierarchies within us, and a condition in which we have come to ourselves.

Now in a certain sense all earthly life is an outcome of what we have experienced in pre-earthly existence between death and a new birth. As you will remember, I have told you how even such faculties in man's earthly life as walking, speaking, and thinking are transformations of certain activities in pre-earthly existence. Today we will turn our attention more specifically to the life of soul.

What we experience in pre-earthly existence in working together with the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies leaves in us a heritage for our earthly life, a faint shadow of this communion with the Hierarchies. If between death and a new birth we had no such community of life with the Beings of the Hierarchies, we could not unfold, here on Earth, the power of love. The power of love we unfold here on Earth is of course only a faint reflection, a shadow of our communion with the Spirit-Beings of the Higher Hierarchies between death and a new birth, but it is a reflection of that communion. That here on the Earth we are able to unfold human love, sympathetic understanding for another human being, is due to the fact that between death and a new birth we are able to live in communion with the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies.

Spiritual-scientific vision enables us to perceive what happens to those who in previous earthly lives acquired little aptitude—we shall presently speak of how it is acquired—for living together during the appropriate period after death with the Beings of the Hierarchies, in certain states entirely given up to them. Such men here on Earth are incapable of unfolding love in which there is real strength, incapable of unfolding that all-embracing love which comes to expression in the power to understand other men. We may say with truth: it is among the Gods, in pre-earthly existence, that we acquire the gift for observing our fellow-man, to perceive how he thinks and how he feels, to understand him with inner sympathy. If we were deprived of this intercourse with the Gods—for so indeed it may be called—we should never be capable of unfolding here on Earth that insight into other human beings which alone makes earthly life a reality. When in this connection I speak of love, and especially of all-embracing human love, you must think of love as having this real and concrete meaning; you must think of it as signifying a genuine, intimate understanding of the other man. If to the all-embracing love of humanity, this understanding of one's fellow-man is added, we have everything that constitutes human morality. For human morality on Earth—if it is not merely expressed in empty phrases or fine talk or in resolutions not afterwards carried out—depends upon the interest one man takes in another, upon the capability to see into the other man. Those who have the gift of understanding other human beings will receive from this understanding the impulses for a social life imbued with true morality.

So we may also say: everything that constitutes moral life in earthly existence has been acquired by man in pre-earthly existence; from his communion with the Gods there has remained in him the urge to unfold, in the soul at any rate, community on Earth as well. And it is the development of a life where the one man together with the other fulfils the tasks and the mission of the Earth—it is this alone that in reality leads to the moral life on Earth. Thus we see that love, and the outcome of love—morality—are in very truth a consequence of what man has experienced spiritually in pre-earthly existence.

Now let us think of the other condition in the life between death and rebirth, when man's consciousness of communion with the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies has been dimmed, when, as in earthly sleep, the impressions from the environment are silenced, when deliberate communion with the higher Beings ceases and man ‘comes to himself.’ This condition too has a consequence, an echo, a heritage, here in earthly life—and this heritage is the faculty of Memory.

The possibility for us to have experiences at a definite moment and then after a lapse of time to draw forth from the depth of our being something that brings pictures of these experiences into our consciousness—this faculty of memory that is so necessary in our earthly life, is a faint reflection, a shadow, of our independent state of life in the spiritual world. Here on Earth we should only be able to live in the passing moment instead of in our whole past life as far back as a few years after birth, if between death and a new birth we were not able to emerge, as it were, from universal life and be entirely alone, alone in ourselves.

While we are asleep here on Earth, our physical and etheric bodies lie in the bed; our astral body and our Ego are outside the physical and the etheric bodies and are then in a position to experience—unconsciously, it is true—the environment of soul and spirit. Man is unconscious between going to sleep and waking. Nevertheless, as I have already said, he does indeed have experiences during sleep, some of which I have also described. But they do not enter the field of consciousness, and in earthly life this is a necessary state of things. What is the reason for it?

If from the time of going to sleep to that of waking we were to experience what we do in fact experience in our Ego and in our astral body, so strongly and intensely as to be able to bring it into consciousness, then every time on waking we should want to impress into the physical and etheric bodies too, what we experienced in sleep; we should want to make our physical and our etheric bodies into something different from what they are. One who has knowledge of what is experienced between going to sleep and waking, must accustom himself to an act of renunciation. He must be able to say to himself: ‘I will refrain from the desire to press what I experience with my Ego and my astral body during sleep into the physical and etheric bodies, for in earthly life these bodies could not stand it.’

It is quite possible to speak in a grotesque way about these things—indeed they can be made to seem almost comical, although what is said is meant very seriously. During sleep man does in fact experience images of the Cosmos. Because of this he is continually being tempted, as an outcome of his sleep, to give himself, for example, a different countenance. If that which does not, in fact, come to his consciousness were to do so, he would always be wanting to change his face, for the face he actually has would be reminding him all the time of former earthly lives, of sins in former earthly lives. In the morning, before waking, there is actually a strong urge in man to do to the physical body something that is like dressing it in clothes. One who has knowledge of this must consciously refrain from giving way to the urge; otherwise he would fall into a completely disorganized condition; he would perpetually be trying to change his whole organism, especially if in one respect or another it happens to be not quite healthy, or something is wrong with it.

But during life between death and a new birth we experience so consciously that this consciousness leads to the forming and shaping of our next physical body. If this were left to ourselves alone, we should not shape the physical body in accordance with our karma. In reality, however, we form it together with the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies, the Beings who watch over our karma. And so we get the eyes, the nose, and so forth, which in all probability we should not, if it were left to us, have given to ourselves. For there are certain times between death and a new birth when we are intensely egoistic—precisely at those times when the consciousness of our connection with the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies has been dimmed. Our experiences are then so strong and intense that out of the forces they contain the physical body can be formed; and we do in fact form it.

This is an experience of such intensity that it has in it the seed of actual creation. Then, through the very fact that it is much weakened in earthly life, it takes effect partly as earthly love and partly as the faculty of remembrance, as memory.

Here on Earth, the fact that we feel ourselves within an Ego, depends upon memory. If we lived only in the present and had no memories, our Ego would have no inner coherence. In fact, as I have often said, we should not be able to feel ourselves in a strongly marked Ego at all. You can understand how memory as an earthly, shadowlike faculty comes into being. It comes into being through the fact that in pre-earthly existence in the spiritual world, a faculty of tremendous power is present—the faculty whereby in those periods when we ‘come to ourselves’ we prepare our body according to the instructions received from the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies, when, in the other state of existence, we live in union with them.

This faculty is at work, to begin with as a formative force, in our body. In the child, as long as it has no consciousness leading to memory—i.e. in the earliest period of childhood—this stronger creative force still enters into and works with the forces of growth. Then something that is finer, more rarefied, is as it were separated out from these stronger forces—and this is the human faculty of memory.

The fact that here on Earth too, man lives primarily in himself, is again connected with this faculty of memory. Memory is also very much connected with human egoism on the one side and, on the other, with human freedom. Freedom will become a reality in a human being in whose life on Earth there is a true echo of what is experienced in pre-earthly existence as a kind of rhythm: namely, feeling oneself united with the Beings of the Hierarchies, freeing oneself, entering into union again, and so on. Here on Earth the experiences come to expression, not as a rhythm, but as two co-existing human faculties: the faculty of love and the faculty of memory. But a certain heritage from this rhythm in pre-earthly existence can remain with man. If this is so, then in earthly life too, the true relationship will be established in him between memory and love. He will be able on the one side to develop understanding, loving understanding of other men. And on the other side, from his experience of the world together with other human beings, his own re-collective thinking will contribute to his own development, to the strengthening of his own nature.

A true relationship of this kind can remain as a legacy of the rhythm that is an essential in pre-earthly existence. But the true relationship may also be upset. It may, for instance, be that a man is willing to be guided only by what he himself has experienced. This trait is greatly accentuated when a man has little interest in what others experience, little faculty of looking into the hearts and minds of others, when his interest is confined almost entirely to what gradually accumulates in his own store of memories. This again is intimately connected with his Ego, and so egoism is intensified.

Such a man gets ‘out of gear’ with himself, because the true relationship existing between death and rebirth is lacking in him; a certain rhythm is not there. And at the same time, when a man takes interest only in what piles up in his own soul, when he is concerned all the time with himself alone, then he becomes increasingly unfit—if I may put it so—for the experiences between death and a new birth. By being interested only in himself, a man shuts himself off in a certain respect from communion with the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies.

A man in whom love and memory are rightly interrelated evolves the feeling of true human freedom instead of egoistic introspection. For in another respect this feeling of human freedom too is an echo of the emergence from communion with the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies between death and a new birth. The feeling of freedom is the healthy aftermath of that emergence; egoism is the morbid aftermath. And as the life together with the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies between death and a new birth is the basis of man's morality on Earth, so the necessary emergence from life in communion with them is at the same time the basis on Earth for the immorality of men, for their severance from one another, for actions on the part of the one that cut across the actions of the other, and so forth. For this is at the root of all immorality. So you see it is necessary for man to be mindful that what can appear here on the Earth as something injurious, has a definite significance for the higher worlds. On the Earth too it is the case that the air we inhale is healthy, while the air we exhale is unhealthy, capable of begetting illness, for in effect we exhale carbonic acid. So too, that which underlies immorality here on the Earth is something that is necessary for our experience in the spiritual world.

These connections must be studied because, in effect, morality and immorality cannot really be explained in the light of earthly conditions. Anyone who attempts such explanations will inevitably be on the wrong track. For through the fact that man is moral or the reverse, he relates himself, in his life of soul, to a supersensible world. And we may say: By directing men's minds to the study of this relationship to a spiritual world, anthroposophical Spiritual Science has made it possible, for the first time, to acquire a basis for understanding the moral. To a view of the world that will only acknowledge the validity of science dealing with the world of Nature, the moral can only consist in illusions arising from processes of Nature which are supposed to take their course in man as well.

Assume for a moment that the cosmic nebula of Kant and Laplace, with its mechanical forces and mechanical laws, did actually constitute the beginning of Earth-existence; assume that from these whirling nebulae, through the working of neutral laws of Nature, the kingdoms of earthly existence had come into being, and finally Man. If that were so, man's moral impulses would be mere dreams. For everything he calls moral would pass away when, again in accordance with mechanical laws, the Earth had reached her end. No vindication of the reality of the moral life can ever arise from such a world-view if followed honestly to its conclusions. Vindication of the moral can only result when, as in anthroposophical Spiritual Science, those realms of existence are revealed where the moral is as much a reality as the world of Nature is a reality here in the life between birth and death. As plants grow and blossom here, between death and a new birth certain activities unfold when man is among the Gods. These activities are the moral element in its reality, the reality of the moral element. In that realm the moral has reality, whereas on the Earth there is only a reflection of that reality. But man, we must remember, belongs to both worlds. Hence for him, if he can perceive these facts in the light of Spiritual Science, the moral world has reality—but knowledge of this reality can never be derived from physical existence.

Here you have one reason why it is necessary for man to acquire understanding of Spiritual Science. Without Spiritual Science he could not really be honest with his knowledge. He could not honestly ascribe reality to the moral world, because he is not willing to investigate the realm where that reality lies. It is of tremendous importance to understand such a sentence as this in the right way. But there is still another respect in which I want to emphasize how necessary the knowledge attainable through Spiritual Science is to man. Here again we shall have to turn to the realities of another world.

Already when we achieve Imaginative Knowledge—the knowledge that enables us to live in the etheric world instead of in the physical world, so that instead of physical things we perceive the activities (for activities they are) in the ether—already when this is achieved, three-dimensional Space as it is on Earth falls away from our field of experience. To speak of a three-dimensional space has no meaning, for we are then living in Time. Hence from from other standpoints I have spoken of the etheric body as a Time-organism. I have said, for example, that here, in the spatial organism, we have the head and, let us say, the leg; and if we sting or cut our leg the head will feel it. Spatially, in this spatial body, one organ is connected with the others. So in the time-body which consists in processes—processes in which everything lying in the deeper foundations of our human nature between birth and death are involved—every detail is connected with every other.

You will remember that in lectures on Education I have said that if at a certain age in childhood we have learnt to have reverence, this power of reverence is transformed in later years into a power of gentleness and blessing which can be conveyed to other men. On the other hand, those who in childhood were never able to revere in the true way cannot unfold this power to bless in later life. As in the spatial organism the foot or the leg is connected with the head, so youth is connected with old age, and old age with youth. It is only for external physical vision that the world flows in the one direction, from the past into the future. For higher vision there is also the reverse stream, from the future into the past. It is into this stream, as I have described, that we enter after death, journeying backwards.

In the time-organism everything is interconnected. If the spatial organism as a whole is to be in order, you cannot remove essential organs from it. You cannot, for instance, remove any considerable part of your face without ruining the whole organism. Similarly you cannot remove anything belonging to man that takes its course in time. Imagine that in the spatial organism, at the place where your eyes are situated there were some quite different growth—instead of eyes, some kind of tumor. Then you could not see. As the eyes are situated at a definite place in the spatial organism, so in the time-organism—and I now mean not only the time-organism between birth and death but the time-organism in man that reaches beyond all births and deaths—in this time-organism is incorporated everything that exists between birth and death and in this life develops through concepts, ideas, mental pictures, of a spiritual world. And what thus develops are the eyes for beholding supersensible existence. If between birth and death no knowledge of the supersensible world is developed, this will mean blindness in the life in the supersensible world between death and a new birth, just as the absence of eyes means blindness in the spatial organism. Man passes through death even if on Earth he acquires no knowledge of the supersensible world; but he enters then into a world where he sees nothing, where he can only grope his way about.

This is the agonizing experience that is the natural corollary of the materialistic age for one who has true insight into Initiation-Science today. He sees how men on Earth lapse into materialism; but he also knows what this lapse means for the spiritual life. He knows that it means eradication of the eyes, that in the existence awaiting them after death, men will only be able to grope their way about. In olden times, when there was instinctive knowledge of the supersensible world, men passed through the gate of death able to see. That old, instinctive supersensible knowledge is now extinct. Today, spiritual knowledge must be consciously acquired—spiritual knowledge, I say, not clairvoyance. As I have always emphasized, clairvoyance too can be attained, but that is not the essential here. The essential thing is that what is discovered through clairvoyant research shall be understood—as it can be understood—by ordinary human reason, healthy human reason. Clairvoyance is needed to investigate these things, but it is not needed for acquiring the faculty of sight in the supersensible world after death. And anyone who declares that ordinary knowledge acquired through healthy human reason does not give him eyes for supersensible existence but that for this he needs clairvoyance—anyone who speaks like this might just as well declare that man cannot think unless his eyes do the thinking. As little as in physical life the eyes need think, as little does knowledge of the supersensible worlds need clairvoyance for the purposes I have indicated today.

Naturally, there would be no supersensible knowledge on Earth if there were no clairvoyance; but even the seer must make intelligible in the ordinary way what he sees in the supersensible. However powerful a man's clairvoyant faculty might be in earthly life, however clear his vision of the spiritual world, if he were too easy-going to bring into the form of logical, intelligible ideas what he sees in the spiritual world, he would still be blinded in the spiritual world after death.

What constitutes the great suffering for one who has insight into modern Initiation-Science is that he must admit: materialism makes men blind when they pass through the gate of death. And here again is something showing that it is of significance for the whole of cosmic existence whether man today inclines to supersensible knowledge or not. The time when it is essential for him to do so has arrived; the very progress of humanity depends upon man acquiring supersensible knowledge.

The faculties needed by man in order that he may be able to confront the world and work in it during earthly life are connected, as I have shown, with his activities in the spiritual world between death and rebirth. This means, however, that here on Earth man lives in certain spheres which on the Earth itself have no inherent reality, which manifest their reality only when observed in the supersensible realm.

We will turn our attention today to the three domains which actually comprise all human activity on Earth: to the thoughts through which man endeavors to assimilate Truth in the world; to feelings, in so far as in and through his world of feeling, man endeavors to assimilate the Beautiful; to his will-nature, in so far as he is meant to bring the Good to fulfilment through it.

When we speak of thoughts, we mean that domain through which Truth can be assimilated. But thoughts in themselves cannot be real. Precisely when we are clear that through our thoughts we have to inform ourselves about the truth of what is real, then it must also be admitted that thoughts, as such, cannot be anything real. Just imagine for a moment that you were to be fixed as firmly in your thoughts as you are in your brain or your heart; if that were the case, these thoughts would indeed be something real in themselves. We should not be able to assimilate reality through them. Nor could we ever express through human speech what human speech is intended to express if it contained full reality in the ordinary earthly sense. If every time we uttered a sentence we were obliged to work something heavy out of the mouth, we should be unable to express anything; it would rather be a matter of producing something. In this sense, what is spoken is not a reality in itself, but ‘signifies’ a reality, just as thoughts are not themselves a reality but merely signify a reality. And if we consider the Good, then we shall find that what is formed through physical reality can never be called the Good. We must bring up from the depths of our being the impulse to Goodness, at first as something entirely unreal, and then make it a reality. If the impulse to Goodness were to arise like hunger, as an external reality, Goodness is just what it could not be. Again, when you are looking at a statue it does not occur to you to think that you can converse with it. It is merely semblance; and in the semblance something is made manifest, namely: Beauty. So that in Truth, reality is certainly indicated; but Truth itself moves in an element of unreality; and it is the same with Beauty, the same with Goodness.

It is therefore necessary for man that his thoughts are not, in themselves, real. Just imagine—if thoughts were to wander around in the head like leaden figures, then, to be sure, you would be aware of a reality, but these leaden thoughts would not be able to signify anything to you, they would be something real themselves. As truly as Thoughts, as the Beautiful and the Good too cannot be directly real, so it is also true that reality is necessary in this physical-earthly world in order that we can have Thoughts, make the Beautiful manifest in the world through art, and also bring the Good to fulfilment.

In speaking of this I come today to a domain of Spiritual Science which can lead us very deeply into the spirituality that is around us here on Earth and is essential for earthly existence, but completely withdrawn from the observation possible to the senses and hence cannot be grasped by the ordinary consciousness which depends, as you know, entirely upon physical perception. The fact is that we are surrounded everywhere by spiritual beings of the greatest possible variety, only the ordinary consciousness does not perceive them. Their existence is necessary in order that as human beings we may be able to unfold our faculties, to have thoughts in their chimerical lightness and evanescence, so that they are not present in our heads like leaden weights, are not something real in themselves, but can ‘signify’ reality.

For this it is necessary that there should be beings in the world who prevent our thoughts with their non-reality from immediately vanishing from us again. We men are really too cumbersome, too ponderous, to be able without more ado to hold fast our thoughts with the ordinary consciousness. Elemental beings must be there, beings who help us ever and again to hold fast our thoughts. Such elemental beings are indeed present, only they are extraordinarily hard to discover because they always conceal themselves. When we ask: How does it really come about that we can hold fast a thought when it has no reality at all? Who is helping us to do this?—even then it is very easy to be deceived, precisely when the matter is considered in the light of Spiritual Science. For at the very moment we begin to ask ourselves the question: by whom are thoughts held fast for men?—through this very desire to know about the spirit-entities who hold thoughts fast, we are driven into the realm of the Ahrimanic beings; we plunge into the realm of these beings and very soon begin to believe—although it is of course a deceptive belief—that man must be supported by the Ahrimanic spirits in order to hold fast the thoughts, so that they shall not vanish the moment he grasps them. On this account, most people are—unconsciously—even grateful to the Ahrimanic beings for supporting them in their thinking. But it is misplaced gratitude, for there is a whole kingdom of beings who support us in our thought-world particularly, and who are by no means Ahrimanic.

These beings are difficult to find in the spiritual world, even for well-trained vision. One finds them sometimes by observing a very clever man at work; if one watches such a man one can perceive that he actually has a volatile, fleeting band of followers. He does not go about alone but has a fugitive following of spiritual beings who do not belong to the Ahrimanic kingdom, but who have an altogether remarkable character. One first really learns to know these beings when one can observe those other beings who belong to the Ahrimanic realm, to the elemental kingdoms, and therefore are not perceptible to the eyes of the senses, who are at work when forms in Nature, crystal forms, for example, arise. The activity of these beings underlies all form; you find them described in my Mystery Plays as beings who chisel and hammer out solid forms. If you think of the gnome-like beings in one of the Mystery Plays^NoteNum you have there the beings who produce forms. Now these beings are sly and crafty—as you can see from the way I have presented them in the Play—and they mock at the scanty intelligence possessed by men. Call to mind those scenes from the Mystery Play if they are known to you.

Now if we observe a really clever man and perceive how he may have a retinue consisting of a whole host of such beings as I have described, we find that these beings are despised by the gnome-spirits of the elemental world because they are clumsy and, above all, because they are terribly foolish. Foolishness is their main characteristic! And so it can be said that precisely the very cleverest people in the world, when we can observe them from this aspect, are followed by whole troops of ‘spirit-fools.’ It is as if these foolish spirits wanted to belong to someone. And they are greatly disdained by the beings who fashion and shape forms in Nature in the way described in the Mystery Plays. We can therefore say: among the worlds unknown to begin with to ordinary consciousness, there is one that is peopled by a spirit-folk of ‘fools,’ fools who throng towards human wisdom and cleverness. In the present age these beings have actually no life of their own. They achieve a life by using the life of those who are dying, who are dying from illness but in whom life-forces are still present. These beings can only make use of a life that is past. Thus there are spirit-fools who use the life that remains over from men; they sate themselves with the life that lingers in cemeteries and such places.

It is when we penetrate into worlds like this that we realize how densely populated is the realm lying behind the world that is perceptible to the senses, how manifold are the classes of spirit-beings, and how closely connected these spirit-beings are with our faculties. A clever man pursuing his activities, who is merely clever and not clairvoyant, can hold fast his thoughts precisely through the fact that he is followed by this troop of spirit-fools. These spirit-fools rivet themselves to his thoughts, drag at them and give them weight, so that they remain with him, whereas otherwise they would quickly vanish from him.

These beings are, as I said, bitterly scoffed at by the gnome-like beings. The gnome-like beings will not tolerate them in their realm although they belong to it. The gnome-like beings drive the others away continually and there is a hard fight between the gnome-folk and this folk of spirit-fools through whom alone wisdom is made possible for man; otherwise the wisdom would be fugitive, would pass away the moment it came into existence, could not remain. As has been said, these beings are hard to discover because it is so easy to fall into the Ahrimanic sphere directly questions are asked about them. But one can find them on occasions such as I have just indicated, by observing very clever men who are followed by a whole troop of such beings. Apart from that, however, when there are not enough clever thoughts fastening on to men, these beings are to be found lingering, for example, in libraries—when the books contain clever material. When the contents of books are stupid these beings are not to be found; they are to be found only where there is cleverness. On that they rivet themselves.

This gives us some insight into a realm that surrounds us everywhere, that is present just as the Nature-kingdoms are present, that has something to do with our faculties, but is very difficult to assess. If we wish to do that we must rely upon those gnome-like beings and set some store by their judgment—and they, in fact, consider the other beings stupid and impudent.

But these other beings have yet another characteristic. When they are too severely persecuted by the gnome-like beings they escape into human heads, and whereas outside in Nature they are almost giants—of an enormous size—they become quite tiny when they are inside men's heads. One could say that they are an abnormal species of Nature-spirits, who are, however, intimately connected with the whole of human evolution on the Earth.

Beings of another kind live chiefly in the watery and airy elements, just as do those beings described in the Mystery Plays as the sylph-like beings. The beings to whom I am now referring have chiefly to do with the world of ‘beautiful semblance.’ They attach themselves less to men who are clever in the ordinary sense than to those who are genuinely artistic in nature. But these beings too are very hard to discover as they can so easily conceal themselves. They are to be found where there are genuine works of art, where, for instance, the human form or forms of Nature and so forth are portrayed in semblance. There they are to be found.

These beings too, as I said, can only be discovered with difficulty. When, for instance, we ask: How is it that beautiful semblance interests us, that there are occasions when we derive greater pleasure from a beautiful statue than from a living person (true, it is a different kind of pleasure, but for all that, greater), or that we are edified and delighted by melodies or harmonies? When we ask ourselves this we very easily fall into a different realm, into the realm of the Luciferic beings. It is not only the Luciferic beings who promote enthusiasm for art, but again there is a kingdom of elemental beings by whom interest in art is stimulated and kept alive in man. Without such beings, man would never be disposed to take an interest in beautiful semblance, simply because it is unreal.

Now the reason why it is so difficult to discover these beings is because they can conceal themselves even more easily than the spirit-fools, for they are actually only present where beauty makes its power felt. And when we are wrapt in enjoyment of the beautiful, then we certainly do not see these beings. Why is this?

In order to get a sight of them in a normal way, we must endeavor, while given up in some way to artistic impressions, to direct clairvoyant vision to the beings who are depicted in the same scene in the Mystery Play as nymph- or sylph-like beings; these beings too belong to the elemental Nature-kingdoms, and we must project ourselves into them. We must, as it were, look with these air- and water-beings at the others who are present whenever joy is taken in beauty. And as this is difficult, we must turn to other means of help. Now fortunately it is easy to discover these beings when we are listening to someone who speaks beautifully and whose language we do not properly understand; when we hear only the sounds without understanding the meaning. If we then abandon ourselves to the experience of this beautiful speaking—but it must be really beautiful speaking, genuine oratory, and we must not be able to understand it properly—then we can acquire the faculty, intimate and delicate as it is, of seeing these beings.

Thus we must try, as it were, to acquire the talent of the sylphs and to strengthen it through the talent that unfolds when we listen to beautiful speech without endeavoring to understand the meaning but having ears only for its beauty. Then we discover the beings who are present wherever beauty is and lend their support so that man can have a true interest in it.

And then follows the disillusionment, the great and terrible surprise. For these beings are in fact hideously ugly, the very ugliest that can be imagined; they are ghastly creatures, the very archetypes of ugliness. And if we have developed the requisite spiritual vision and visit some studio where artistic work is being done, we find that it is these beings who are present on Earth, like spiders on the ground of world-existence, in order that men may take interest in beauty. It is through these frightful spider-creatures of an elemental order that interest in beauty really awakens. Man simply could not have the right interest in beauty if in his life of soul he were not entangled in a world of hideously ugly spider-like beings.

When they are going through a Gallery, people have no inkling—for what I have said refers only to discovering the form of these beings, who are always present when anyone is delighting in beauty—people have no inkling of how they are strengthened in the interest they take in beautiful pictures by having these hideous spider-like creatures creeping in and out of their ears and nostrils.

Man's enthusiasm for what is beautiful arises on the foundation of ugliness. That is a cosmic secret, my dear friends. The spur of ugliness is needed in order that the beautiful may be made manifest. And the greatest artists were men who because of their strong bodily constitution could endure the invasions of these spidery beings in order to produce, let us say, a Sistine Madonna, or the like. Whatever beauty is brought forth in the world has been lifted out of a sea of ugliness through the enthusiasm in the human soul.

Let it not be thought that behind the veil of the material world, in the region beyond the threshold, we come into a realm of pure beauty. Do not imagine that anyone who is cognizant of these things speaks lightheartedly when he says that if men are not properly prepared they must be held back at the threshold of the spiritual world. For it is essential first of all to know the thoroughly unedifying foundations of all that in front of the curtain as it were, is uplifting and edifying.

Therefore if with spiritual sight we move about the elemental world belonging to air and water, again we see the great battle waging between the fleeting sylphs and undines and these archetypes of ugliness. Although I spoke of the latter as spidery creatures, the tissues of which they are formed are not like those of spiders as we know them, but they are composed of the elements of water and watery vapor. They are volatile air-formations, the ugliness of which is enhanced inasmuch as every second they have a different ugliness; each succeeding ugliness gives the impression of being even worse than its predecessor. This world is present in air and water together with everything that is delightful there.

And now in order that man may unfold enthusiasm for the Good, something else takes place. It can be said of the other beings that they are more or less actually there, but in the case of the beings of whom I am now going to speak it must really be said that they are continually coming into existence, whenever, in fact, a man has within him warmth of feeling for Goodness. It is in this warmth that these beings develop; their nature itself is warm and fiery; they live in the present but their inherent nature is similar to what I have described in the book Occult Science in connection with the Saturn-existence of man.

As man was in the Old Saturn-existence, so are these beings today. Their form is not the same but their nature is similar. It cannot be said of them that they are beautiful or ugly, or anything of that kind; they must be judged in comparison with the ordinary elemental warmth-beings who, as you know, also exist. All spiritual research in this sphere is extraordinarily difficult. It is very difficult to approach the beings who live entirely in warmth, that is to say, in ‘fire’ in the old sense, and when one does come upon them it is not very pleasant. One comes upon them, for instance, when lying in a high fever, but then as a rule one is not a really objective observer. Otherwise it is a matter of developing the requisite faculty for perceiving these warmth-beings by elaborating the methods indicated in my books. These warmth-beings have a certain relationship with the beings who appear, for instance, when a man has warm enthusiasm for the Good, but the relationship is of a very peculiar kind. I will assume hypothetically—for only in that way can I describe these things—that warmth-beings of the normal kind are present, originating in man's physical warmth, which as you know is greater than the warmth of the environment. Man has his own warmth, hence these particular beings are near him. And now, in a man who has enthusiasm for the Good these other beings make themselves manifest; they too are warmth-beings, but of a different kind. When they are in the neighbourhood of the normal fire-beings they immediately draw back from them and slip into the inmost recesses of man's nature. If one then makes great efforts to discover their essential characteristics in contrast to those of the normal warmth-beings, one finds that they have an inner, but very pronounced, bashfulness. They refuse absolutely to be observed by other beings of the spiritual world, and flee from them because they are ashamed of being seen; they flee first and foremost into the inmost nature of man. Hence they are hard to discover. Actually they are only to be discovered if we observe ourselves in certain moments that it is really not so very easy to bring about at will. Just suppose that in spite of not being in the least sentimental we are moved to tears simply by reading a scene in a book that grips us deeply and dramatically. Some great and good action is described, let us say, in a novel. If we have the power of self-observation we can discover how whole hosts of such beings (who have such delicate sensibility that they do not want to be seen by any other beings of the spiritual world) flee into our heart, into our breast, how they come to us, how they seek protection from the other warmth-beings and in fact from any other beings of the elemental spiritual worlds.

There is a significant force of repulsion between the normal warmth-beings and these other warmth beings with their intense bashfulness who live only in the sphere of man's moral life and who flee from contact with other spirit-beings. These beings are present in far greater numbers than is usually imagined and it is they who imbue man with enthusiasm for the morally good. Man would not readily acquire this enthusiasm for the morally good if these beings did not come to his aid; and when a man loves the moral, he has a real bond, an unconscious bond, with these beings.

Certain of their characteristics are such as may lead us to misunderstand this whole kingdom. For after all, why do these beings feel bashful and ashamed? It is actually because all the other beings in the elemental kingdoms of the spiritual world in which they live, disdain them, will have nothing to do with them. They are aware of this and the disdain to which they are subjected causes them to stimulate enthusiasm for the Good.

These beings have certain other characteristics of which I do not care to speak, for the human soul is so obviously upset at any mention of such hideous spidery creatures. I therefore prefer not to refer to certain of their peculiarities. But at any rate we have heard how what unfolds in the realm of the senses as the True, the Beautiful, the Good, unfolds from foundations which need the three spiritual kingdoms I have described, just as we on Earth need the ground on which we walk. These beings do not create the True, the Beautiful or the Good. But the thoughts which express the True, signify the True, need the spirit-dunderheads, so that they may move on their shoulders. The Beautiful that man produces needs the ugly water- and air-spiders so that it can raise itself out of this ocean of ugliness. And the Good needs a kingdom of beings who cannot show themselves at all among the other normal warmth-beings, who must always fight shy of them, and for this very reason evoke enthusiasm for the Good.

If these beings did not exist, then instead of thoughts in our heads we should have, if not exactly leaden soldiers, at least heavy vapors and nothing clever could possibly result. In order to produce the Beautiful we should need to have the gift of imbuing it with actual life in order that men's interest might be aroused. In order that here, in the world of the senses, there may be at hand what we need for the activity of thought, for the sense of beauty, for the will to arouse enthusiasm for the good—for this, three such elemental kingdoms are necessary.

The normal elemental kingdoms—that is, the kingdoms of the gnomes, sylphs, undines and salamanders, to use folk-terminology—are still at the stage of striving to become something in the world. They are on the way to having forms resembling those in our sense-world; the forms will not be the same, but one day they will become perceptible to the senses possessed by men today, whereas now, in their elementary existence, these beings are not perceptible to the ordinary senses.

The beings I have now described to you have in fact already by-passed the stage at which men and animals and plants are today. So that if, for example, we were able to go back to the Old Moon-existence which preceded the Earth, we should there encounter the beings found on Earth today as the bashful beings connected with moral impulses in man. On the Old Moon they would have been perceptible as a real animal world, spinning as it were from tree to tree. But you must call to mind the Old Moon-existence as I have described it in the book Occult Science. Everything in this Moon-existence was pliable and fluid and metamorphosis has continually taken place. Among the beings there, spinning in and out, were those hideous beings I have described, those spidery creatures permeating the Old Moon and visible there. And there were also present the beings who as spirit-fools accompany the wise on the Earth today. They were a factor in bringing about the destruction of the Old Moon, so that the Earth could arise. And even now, during Earth-existence, these beings have no pleasure in the formation of crystals, but rather in the breaking up of everything mineral.

Thus while we can say of the normal elemental beings that they will one day become visible to the senses, we must say of these other beings: once upon a time they were visible to the senses and have now sprung over into the spiritual—admittedly through their Luciferic and Ahrimanic natures. Thus there are two kinds of elemental beings—ascending and descending. We can say: on the ‘dung’ of Old Moon ugliness—which was there in profusion during the Old Moon-existence—on the ‘dung’ of Old Moon ugliness, our world of beauty springs forth.

You have an analogy in Nature when you carry manure to the fields and beautiful plants spring from it. There you have an analogy in Nature except that the dung, the manure, is also perceptible to the senses. So it is when the half-reality of the world of beauty is observed clairvoyantly. Try to envisage this half-real world of beauty, quite apart from the teeming life in the three kingdoms of Nature on the Earth; picture all the beautiful after-effects springing from the Earth. Just as lovely flowers spring up in a meadow, you must spiritually picture underneath it all the Moon-dung which contains the ugly spidery creatures I have described. Just as cabbage does not grow unless it is manured, as little can beauty blossom on the Earth unless the Gods manure the Earth with ugliness. That is the inner necessity of life. And this inner necessity of life must be known to us, for such knowledge alone can give us the power to confront with understanding what actually surrounds us in Nature.

Anyone who believes that beauty in art can be produced on Earth without the foundation of this ugliness is like a man who is horrified that people use manure, insisting that it would be far better to let beautiful things grow without it.—In point of fact it is not possible for beauty to be produced without the foundation of ugliness. And if people do not want to give themselves up to illusion about the world, that is, if they genuinely desire to know the essential and not the illusory, then they must acquire knowledge of these things. Whoever believes that there is art in the world without ugliness does not know what art is. And why not? Simply for the reason that only he who has an inkling of what I have described to you today will enjoy works of art in the right way, for he knows at what cost they are purchased in world-existence. Whoever wants to enjoy works of art without this consciousness is like a man who would prefer to do away with manure on the fields. Such a man has no real knowledge of what grows in Nature; he has, in fact, merely an illusion before him—plants of papier-maché, although real plants are actually there. Whoever does not feel ugliness as the foundation has not the right kind of delight in beauty.

Such is the world-order and men must acquire knowledge of it if they do not want to go on wandering about like earthworms, keeping to their own element and not looking upwards to what is real. Men can only develop the talents latent within them if they confront reality fairly and squarely. Reality, however, is not attained merely by talking time and time again of spirit, spirit, spirit, but by really coming to know the spiritual. But the fact has also to be faced that in certain regions of the spiritual world something like I have been describing to you today will be encountered.

• NoteNum. The Soul's Awakening. Scene 2.

I have often referred to the fact that since about the first third of the fifteenth century, human evolution has entered upon a special epoch. It can be said that the age which began approximately in the eighth century B.C. and continued into the first third of the fifteenth century was the age of Græco-Latin culture and that the most recent phase of time in which we are still living today, began at the point I have indicated. Today we will consider the tasks of present-day humanity in connection with this fact.

We know—particularly from the lectures given here lately—that between birth and death man bears in his physical, psychical and spiritual development on Earth the heritage of what he has experienced in pre-earthly existence. And recently we heard in what sense social and moral life is the heritage of that condition between death and rebirth when man lives in intimate communion with the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies. From this communion—it is experienced, as I have described, in rhythmic alternation with another condition—man brings with him the power of love, and this power of love is the foundation of morality on Earth. The other condition is the one in which man withdraws into himself, when, as it were, he lifts himself out of this communion with the Beings of the Hierarchies. And as the heritage of this condition he brings with him to Earth the power of memory, the power of remembrance, which on the one side comes to expression in his egoism, but on the other side predisposes him for freedom, for everything that makes for inner strength and independence.

Until the Graeco-Latin epoch, the faculties that enabled man to shape his civilization from within were in a certain respect still a heritage of pre-earthly existence.

If we go back to still earlier times in the evolution of humanity, to the Old Indian, the Old Persian and the Egyptian epochs, we find evidence everywhere of knowledge, of ideas, which flow as it were out of man's inner being but are also connected with the life between death and rebirth. In the Old Indian epoch man has a clear consciousness that he belongs to the same ‘race’ to which the divine-spiritual Beings of the Hierarchies belong. A man of knowledge in ancient Indian civilization feels himself less a citizen of the Earth than of the world to which these divine-spiritual Beings belong. He feels that he has been sent down to the Earth from the ranks of these divine-spiritual Beings. And he considers that the civilization he spreads over the Earth is there in order that the earthly deeds of man and even the objects and beings of the Earth may conform with the nature of the divine-spiritual Beings to whom he feels himself related.

In the man of ancient Persia this feeling of kinship has already lost some of its former intensity but he too still feels his real home to be what he called the Kingdom of Light, the Kingdom to which he belongs between death and rebirth, and he desires to be a warrior on the side of the spirits of this Kingdom of Light. He wishes to fight against those beings who come from the darkness of the Earth so that the spirits of the Kingdom of Light may not be hampered by these dark beings; he dedicates all his activity to the service of the spirits of the Kingdom of Light. And if we then pass on to the Egyptian and Chaldaean peoples we see how their science is full of knowledge relating to the movements of the stars. The destinies of men are read from what the stars reveal. Before anything is done on Earth, the stars are asked whether it would or would not be justified. This science, according to which all earthly life is regulated, is likewise felt to be a heritage of man's existence between death and rebirth, when his experiences are of a kind that make him one with the movements and laws of the stars, just as here on Earth between birth and death he is one with the beings of the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms.

In the fourth post-Atlantean, the Graeco-Latin epoch, beginning in the eighth century B.C. and lasting until the fifteenth century A.D., men already feel themselves to be true citizens of the Earth. They feel that in their world of ideas between birth and death there are no longer very distinct echoes of experiences in pre-earthly existence. They strive to be at home on the Earth. And yet, if we penetrate deeply into the spirit of Greek and even of early Roman civilization we can say something like the following. The men who are founding science in that age are intent upon learning to know all that goes on in the three kingdoms of Nature upon Earth, but to know it in such a way that this knowledge also has some relation to extra-terrestrial existence. Among the Greeks there is a strong feeling that through the knowledge applied by man on the Earth and in the light of which he regulates his earthly deeds, he should at the same time have a dim remembrance of the divine-spiritual world. The Greek knows that he can gain his knowledge only from observation of the earthly world; but he has a clear feeling that what he perceives in the minerals, in the plants, in the animals, stars, mountains, rivers, and so forth, must be a reflection of the Divine-Spiritual which he can experience in a world other than the world of the senses.

This is the case because in that epoch man still feels that with the best part of his being he belongs to a supersensible world. This supersensible world has, to be sure, become darkened for human observation—that is how man puts it to himself—but during earthly existence too he must strive to illumine it. True, in the Graeco-Latin epoch men can no longer regulate the ordinary deeds of humanity in accordance with the courses of the stars, since their mastery of the science of the stars is not on a par with that of the Chaldaean and the Egyptians; but at all events they still endeavor, rather gropingly, through studying expressions of the will of the divine-spiritual Beings, to bring something of the Divine-Spiritual into the earthly world.

In places of the Oracles and in Temples, men sought to ascertain the will of the Gods from priestesses and prophetesses, as you know from history. And we see how these endeavors to ascertain the will of the divine-spiritual Beings with whom man himself is one during pre-earthly existence, were also customary in other regions of Europe at the time when Graeco-Roman culture was in its prime in the South. In the Germanic regions of Middle Europe, for example, priestesses and prophetesses were highly venerated; pilgrimages were made to them and in ecstatic states of consciousness, the will of the Gods was made known to men so that their deeds on Earth might be in conformity with this will. We can see quite clearly how up to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries—although the urge is by then less intense—man strives to formulate the knowledge he seeks in such a way that it contains within it the will of the divine-spiritual world. Through these centuries of the Middle Ages, right up to the twelfth and thirteenth, we can find places which at that time were still considered sacred and later became our laboratories—we can find places where the so-called alchemists were investigating the forces of substances and of Nature-processes; we can peruse writings which still give a faint picture of the kind of thinking that was applied in those old centres of research and we shall everywhere discover evidence of the striving to bring the substances themselves into such combinations or mutual interaction that the Divine-Spiritual can work in the phial, in the retort.

In Goethe's Faust there is an echo of this attitude of soul, in the scene where Wagner is working in his laboratory to produce Homunculus. It is really not until the turn of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in Western civilization that the desire arises in man to lay the foundations of a science in complete independence, without bringing his ideas into any direct connection with a divine-spiritual will by which the world is ruled. A purely human form of knowledge arises for the first time during this period; it is knowledge that is emancipated from the divine-spiritual will. And it is this purely human knowledge, emancipated from the divine will of which the science of Galileo and Copernicus is composed. It is science through which the universe is presented to man in the abstract picture current today, the picture of a vault—as Giordano Bruno was the first to envisage—with the stars circling in it as purely material bodies, or even in a condition of rest taking their share in cosmic happenings. This picture of the universe makes us imagine that a vast mechanism works in upon the Earth from cosmic space. And even in the investigation of earthly things people confine themselves fundamentally to what can be calculated and measured and so be part of an abstract mechanism. This, however, is a world of conceptions and ideas which man can spin out of himself with the help of external observation and experiment, where the physical substances alone are believed to affect each other, the Nature-processes to become manifest and where the Divine-Spiritual is no longer sought in the world of Nature.

There is a vast difference between this conceptual world and the kind of thought that preceded it in human evolution. It is only since the first third of the fifteenth century that man's concepts and ideas have become purely human. And it is the spatial with which man has mainly concerned himself since this period began.

If you go back still farther to the times of the Old Indian, the Old Persian, the Egypto-Chaldaean culture, everywhere you will find that world-conceptions refer to World Ages. They point back to an ancient epoch when mankind still had intercourse with the Gods, to a Golden Age. They point back to another epoch when man still experienced on Earth at least the sun-reflection of the Divine—a Silver Age, and so on. Time and the course of Time play a conspicuous role in the world-pictures of early evolutionary phases. Likewise, when you consider the Greek epoch, and indeed the world-picture that was current at the same time in the more Northerly and Middle European regions, you will find that everywhere the idea of Time plays an essential part. The Greek points back to that primeval Age when cosmic happenings are the outcome of interaction between Uranus and Gaia. He points to the next Age, to Chronos and Rhea, then to the Age when Zeus and the other Gods known in Greek Mythology rule the Cosmos and the Earth. And it is the same in Germanic Mythology. Time plays the most essential role in all these world-pictures.

A much less important part is played by Space. The spatial element is still obscure in the Norse and Germanic world-pictures with the World Ash, the Giant Ymir and so forth. That something is taking place in Time is quite clear, but the idea of Space is only dimly dawning; it is a factor of no great significance. It is not until the age of Galileo, of Copernicus, of Giordano Bruno, that Space actually begins to play its great role in the picture of the universe. Even in the Ptolemaic system which admittedly is concerned with Space, Time is a more essential factor than it is in the world-picture familiar to us since the fifteenth century, in which Time actually plays a secondary part. The present distribution of the stars in cosmic space is taken as the starting-point and through calculation conclusions are reached as to what the world-picture was like in earlier times. But the conception of Space, the spatial world-picture, becomes of chief importance. And the result is that all human judgments are based on the principle of Space. Modern man has elaborated this element of Space in his external world-picture, elaborated it too in all his thinking. And today this thinking in terms of Space has reached its zenith.

Think how difficult it is for a man of the present day to follow an exposition purely of Time. He is happy if Space is brought in at least to the extent of drawing something on the blackboard. But if the feeling of Space is conveyed by means of photographs, then the modern man is verily in his element! “Illustration”—and by this he means expression in terms of Space—is what man of today strives to achieve in every exposition. Time, inasmuch as it is in perpetual flow, has become something that causes him discomfort. He still attaches value to it in music; but even there the tendency towards the spatial is quite evident.

We need only consider something that has become a definite feature of modern life and this mania of modern man to cleave to the spatial is at once apparent. In the cinema he is utterly indifferent to the element of Time in the picture. He is content with the merest fraction of the Time element and is entirely given up to the element of Space.

This orientation of the soul to the spatial is very characteristic of the present time and whoever observes modern culture and civilization with open eyes will find it everywhere.

On the other hand, in anthroposophical Spiritual Science we are striving, as you know, to get away from the spatial. To be sure, we meet the desire for it in that we too try to give tangible form to the spiritual, and that is justifiable in order to strengthen the faculty of ideation. Only we must always be conscious that this is purely a means of illustration and that what is essential is to strive, at least to strive, to transcend the spatial.

Space ‘devotees’ among us often cause difficulties by making diagrams of the consecutive epochs of Time, writing “First Epoch with Sub-Epochs,” and so on. Then follow a great many captions and what is sequential in Time is dragged into a spatial picture.

Our aim, however, is to transcend the spatial. We are striving to penetrate into the temporal and also into the super-temporal, into the element that leads beyond what is physically perceptible. The physically perceptible exists in its crudest form in the world of Space and there thought is led in a certain direction. I have often spoken of the real intentions of anthroposophical Spiritual Science. It certainly does not belittle, let alone reject, the mode of thinking engendered in the age of Galileo, Copernicus, Giordano Bruno. The validity of this mode of thinking in which, as you know, Space is the essential element, is fully recognized by anthroposophical Spiritual Science. Therefore it ought to be able to shed light into every domain of scientific thought. It must not adopt an amateurish attitude to these domains of scientific thought but must shed light into them by its way of looking at things.

But over and over again it must be stressed that anthroposophical Spiritual Science is endeavoring to guide back again to the Divine-Spiritual this purely human knowledge that is based almost entirely on the element of Space and is emancipated from the Divine-Spiritual. We do not hark back to ancient conditions but we desire to guide the modern attitude of soul into the spiritual, away from its preoccupation with what is purely spatial and material. In other words, we want to learn to talk about spiritual things, as people in the Galileo-Copernican age grew accustomed to talk about substances, about forces. With its methods of study and observation, this Spiritual Science is to be a match for the kind of knowledge that has been developing in connection with the things and processes of the material world since the first third of the fifteenth century. Its aim is the attainment of spiritual knowledge that is related to this Nature-knowledge, although since the former is concerned with the supersensible, the contrast is very apparent.

Inwardly considered, what is it that we are seeking to achieve? If we transfer ourselves in thought into the position of the divine-spiritual Beings in whose ranks we live between death and rebirth, and discern how they direct their gaze downwards, and through the various means I have described observe the course of events on Earth, then we find that these Beings looked down to the Earth in the earlier ages of human evolution—in the Old Indian, Old Persian, Old Chaldaean-Egyptian epochs—and beheld what men were doing, what views they held of Nature and of their own social life. And then—if I may put it so—the Gods were able to say to themselves concerning the deeds and thoughts of men: Their deeds and their thoughts are a result of their memory of, or are an echo of, what they experienced among us in our world.—In the case of the Chaldaeans or Egyptians it was still quite evident that the primary wish of men below on the Earth was to carry out what the Gods above had thought or were thinking. When the Gods looked down to the Earth they beheld happenings that were in keeping with their intentions; and it was the same when they looked into the thoughts of men—as Gods are able to do. Since the first third of the fifteenth century this has changed. Since then, the divine-spiritual Beings have looked down to the Earth, and especially when they look down at the present time, they find that things everywhere are fundamentally alien to them, that men are doing things on the Earth which they themselves have planned in accordance with the phenomena and processes of earthly existence. And to the Gods with whom men live between death and rebirth, this is an entirely alien attitude.

When an alchemist in his laboratory was endeavoring to ascertain the divine-spiritual will through the combination and separation of the Elements, a God would have beheld something akin to his own nature in what the alchemist was doing. If a God were to look into a modern laboratory, the methods and procedure adopted there would be intensely alien to him. It can be said with absolute truth that since the first third of the fifteenth century, the Gods have felt as if the whole human race had fallen away from them in a certain respect, as if men down on the Earth were engaged in self-made trivialities, in things which the Gods are unable to understand,—certainly not the Gods who still guided the hands and minds of men in their scientific pursuits in Graeco-Latin times. These divine-spiritual Beings have no active interest in what is done in modern laboratories, let alone in modern hospitals. I was obliged on a previous occasion to say that when the Gods look down through windows, as I called them, what interests them least of all on Earth is the kind of work carried out by professors. What goes to the very heart of one who has genuine insight into modern Initiation Science is that he is obliged to say to himself: In recent times we men have become estranged from the Gods; we must seek again for bridges to connect us with the divine-spiritual world.—And it is this that quickens the impulse for anthroposophical Spiritual Science. Its desire is to transform the scientific ideas and concepts that are unintelligible to the Gods in such a way that they are spiritualized and are thus able to provide a bridge to the Divine-Spiritual.

It should be realized that light, for example, is something in which divinity is present. This was strongly felt in ancient Persian culture, but today when, for example, attempts are made to indicate by all sorts of lines how the rays from a lens are broken, this is a language that the Gods do not understand; it means nothing at all to them. All these things must be approached by an attitude of soul that enables the bridge to the Divine to be found once again. To realize this means a great deepening of insight into the kind of task that is incumbent upon the present age in the matter of transforming and metamorphosing our unspiritual ideas.

A cosmic truth of deep significance underlies these things. The conception of Space is an entirely human conception. The Gods with whom man lives together in the most important period of his life between death and a new birth have a vivid conception of Time but no conception of Space such as man acquires on Earth. This conception of Space is entirely human. Man really enters into Space for the first time when he descends from the divine-spiritual world into the physical world of the Earth. True, as seen from here, every thing appears in spatial perspective. But thinking in dimensions, if I may put it so, is something that belongs entirely to the Earth.

In Western civilization this conception of Space has become ingrained in man since the fifteenth century. But when through the spiritualizing of purely spatial knowledge, bridges to the divine world have been found again, then what man has gained from the science of Space—in the very period when he has emancipated his thought most drastically from the divine world, i.e. since the fifteenth century—all the spatial knowledge he has gained will become important for the divine-spiritual world as well. And man can conquer a new portion of the universe for the Gods if he will but bring the spirit again into the conception of Space.

You see, what I have described in the book Occult Science—the periods of Old Saturn, Old Sun, Old Moon, Earth and the future periods of Jupiter, Venus, Vulcan—is only present to the Gods in the sequence of Time. Here on Earth, however, it all lives itself out in terms of Space. We are living today in the Earth period proper but in happenings on the Earth there still linger the echoes of the periods of Old Moon, Old Sun and Old Saturn.

If you will steep yourselves in the description of the Old Saturn period given in Occult Science, you will say: The Saturn period is past but the effects of its warmth are still present in our earthly existence. Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth are within one another; they exist simultaneously. The Gods see them in the sequence of Time. Although in earlier ages, even during Chaldaean times they were seen in their succession, now we see them within one another, spatially within one another. Indeed this leads very much farther and if we study these things in detail, we shall discover what really lies behind them.

Imagine that you stretch out your left hand. The Divine lives in everything terrestrial. In your muscles, in your nerves, lives the Divine. Now with the fingers of your left hand you touch the fingers of your right hand—this can only be done in Space. The fact that you feel your right hand with your left, your left hand with your right—this is something which the divine-spiritual Beings do not follow. They follow the left hand and right hand up to the point of contact, but the feeling that arises between the two is an experience which the faculties possessed by the Gods do not make possible; it is something that arises only in Space. Just as little as the Gods behold Saturn, Sun, Moon and Earth simultaneously but only in succession, in Time, so they have none of the purely spatial experiences known to man. When you look with your left and right eyes and have the lines of vision from right and from left, the activity of the Gods is present in the vision from the right eye and again in the vision from the left eye, but in the meeting of the two lines of vision lies the purely human element. Thus we experience as men, because we have been placed into the world of Space, something that is experienced in a state of emancipation from the activity of the Gods.

You need only extend this imagery of the right and left hands to other domains in the life of earthly man, and you will find a great many human experiences that fall right away from the Gods' field of vision. It is really only since the first third of the fifteenth century that man has brought ideas of a purely human kind into these domains. Hence human thinking has become less and less intelligible to the Gods when they look down to the Earth. And with this in mind we must turn our attention to that most important event in the last third of the nineteenth century which may be characterized by saying that the rulership of the Spiritual Being known as Gabriel was succeeded by the rulership of that other Spiritual Being known as Michael.

In the last third of the nineteenth century the Spiritual Being we call Michael became the Ruler, as it were, of everything of a spiritual character in human events on the Earth. Whereas Gabriel is a Being orientated more to the passive qualities of man, Michael is the active Being, the Being who as it were pulses through our breath, our veins, our nerves, to the end that we may actively develop all that belongs to our full humanity in connection with the Cosmos. What stands before us as a challenge of Michael is that we become active in our very thoughts, working out our view of the world through our own inner activity. We only belong to the Michael Age when we do not sit down inactively and desire to let enlightenment from within and from without come to us, but when we co-operate actively in what the world offers us in the way of experiences and opportunities for observation. If a man carries out some experiment, it does not fundamentally involve activity; there is not necessarily any activity on his part; it is just an event like any other event in Nature, except that it is directed by human intelligence. But all happenings in Nature have also been directed by intelligence! How is man's mental life nowadays affected by experiments? There is no active participation, for he simply looks on and tries to eliminate activity as much as possible; he wants to let the experiment tell him everything and regards as fanciful anything that is the outcome of his own inner activity. It is precisely in their scientific ideas that men are least of all in the Michael Age.

But humanity must enter into the Michael Age. If we put the question to ourselves: What does it actually mean in the whole cosmic setting that Gabriel should have passed on the sceptre to Michael?—then we must answer: It means that of all the Beings who spiritually guide humanity, Michael is the Spirit who is the first to draw near to what men here on Earth are doing as the result of this emancipation of knowledge since the first third of the fifteenth century. Gabriel stands in utter perplexity before the ideas and notions of a cultured man of the modern age. Michael, who is closely connected with the forces of the Sun, can at least instil his activity into such thoughts of man as can be impulses for his free deeds. Michael can work, for instance, into what I have called in Occult Science, free, pure thinking, which must be the true impulse for the individual will of man acting in freedom in the new age. And with the deeds of man which spring from the impulse of love, Michael has his own particular relationship.

Hence he is the messenger whom the Gods have sent down so that he may receive what is now being led over from knowledge emancipated from spirit into spiritualized knowledge. The science which as anthroposophical Spiritual Science again spiritualizes spatial thinking, lifts it again into the supersensible—this Spiritual Science works from below upwards, stretches out its hands as it were from below upwards to grasp the hands of Michael stretching down from above. It is then that the bridge can be created between man and the Gods. Michael has become the Regent of this Age because he is to receive what the Gods wish to receive from what man can add to the Time-concept through the Space-concept—for this augments the knowledge possessed by the Gods.

The Gods picture Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, in the succession of Time. If man rightly develops the latest phase of his life of thought, he sees this in terms of Space. The Gods can picture the outstretching of the left and of the right hand, but the actual contact is a purely human matter. The Gods can live in the line of vision of the left eye, in the line of vision of the right eye. Man envisages in terms of Space how the vision of the left eye meets that of the right eye. Michael directs his gaze down upon the Earth. He is able, by entering into connection with what men develop in pure thought and objectify in pure will, to take cognisance of what is acquired by the citizens of Earth, by men, as the fruit of thinking in terms of Space, and to carry it up into divine worlds.

If men were merely to develop Space-knowledge and not spiritualize it, if they were to stop short at Anthropology and were not willing to advance to Anthroposophy, then the Michael Age would go by. Michael would retire from his rulership and would bring this message to the Gods: Humanity desires to separate itself from the Gods.—If Michael is to bring back the right message to the world of the Gods, he must speak to this effect: During my Age, men have raised to the Supersensible what they have already developed in the way of thinking purely in terms of Space; and we can therefore accept men again, for they have united their thought with ours.—If human evolution proceeds in the right way, Michael will not have to say to the Gods: Men have become accustomed to stare at everything spatially; they have learnt to despise what lives only in Time.—If human beings are resolved to achieve their earthly goal, Michael will say: Men have made efforts to bring Time and the Supersensible again into the Spatial; therefore those who are not content merely to stare at the Spatial, who are not content to accept everything in such a material form as was customary at the beginning of the twentieth century, can be regarded as having linked their lives directly to the life of the Gods.—

If we genuinely pursue Anthroposophy in the light of Initiation Science, it means that we concern ourselves with cosmic affairs, with affairs which humanity has to work out in harmony with the world of the Gods. And in the present age very much is at stake; it is a matter of whether we shall or shall not sow the seed for true communion in the future with the divine-spiritual world.

When you realize the tremendous significance of this issue, you will be able to measure the earnestness and inner steadfastness needed by the soul if Anthroposophy is to be the content of its life of thought.

Man perceives the things of the world through his senses but with his ordinary consciousness he does not perceive what takes place within the senses themselves. Were he to do this in everyday life he would not be able to perceive the outer world. The senses must, as it were, renounce themselves if they are to bring to man's cognizance what lies outside the senses in the world immediately surrounding him on Earth. If our ear could speak or our eye could speak, if we could by this means become aware of the processes taking place in those organs, we should not be able to hear what is outwardly audible nor see what is outwardly visible. But it is precisely this that enables man to know the world round about him, in so far as he is an Earth-being; he does not, however, thereby learn to know himself. This presupposes that during the process of acquiring self-knowledge one is able to suspend all cognition of the outer world, so that for a time nothing at all is experienced from the external world.

In Spiritual Science it has always been the endeavor to discover methods through which man may acquire true self-knowledge, and you are aware from the many different lectures I have given, that by this self-knowledge I do not mean the ordinary kind of brooding contemplation of the everyday self; for all that a man experiences thereby is simply a reflex picture of the external world. He learns nothing that is new; he merely gets to know, as it were in a mirror, what he has experienced in the outer physical world. True self-knowledge must, as you know, proceed through methods which silence not only the earthly outer world, but also the everyday soul-content which, as it exists in actual consciousness, is simply a mirror-picture of the outer world. And through the methods described in the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, you know that spiritual research advances first to what is called Imaginative Cognition. Whoever advances to this Imaginative Cognition has before him, to begin with, everything from the supersensible world that can clothe itself in the images and pictures of this form of higher knowledge. And when he has acquired the inner faculty of Imaginative vision of the world, he is in a position to follow what takes place in the human sense-organs.

It would not be possible to follow what takes place in the sense-organs if something were to go on there only while the outer world were being perceived through them. When I am seeing an object of the outer world, my eye is still. When I am hearing some sound of the outer world my ear is still. This means that what the ear becomes aware of is not what goes on within the ear itself but what is continuing from the external world into the ear. But if, for example, the ear were only to be active in connection with the external world as long as outer perception were taking place, we should never be able to observe the process that goes on in the ear itself, independently of the outer world. But you all know that a sense-impression has an after-effect in the senses, apart from the fact that the senses always take part even when we are merely thinking actively in our ordinary consciousness.

It is possible to withdraw entirely from the external world in so far as it is a world of color, of sound, of smell, and so forth, and give attention only to what goes on within, or by means of, our sense-organs themselves. When we reach this point we have taken the first step towards acquiring true knowledge of man. To take the simplest example, let us say we want to understand how an impression made upon the eye from outside dies away. A person who has acquired the faculty of Imaginative Cognition is able, because he is perceiving nothing in the external world, to follow this dying away of the sense-impression. That is to say, he is following a process in which the sense-organ as such is involved, although at this moment it is actually not in connection with the external world. Or, let us say, someone can picture vividly to himself something he has seen, realizing how the organ of sight participated in the living thought of the colors, and so on. The same can be done in the case of all the senses. Then such a person actually becomes aware that what takes place within the senses themselves can only be perceived by Imaginative Cognition. A world of Imaginations appears before our soul as if by magic when we live, not in the external world, but in the senses themselves. And then we realize that our senses actually belong to a world other than the one we perceive through them in our Earth-existence. Nobody who is truly in a position, through the acquisition of Imaginative Knowledge, to observe the activity of his own senses, can ever doubt that man, as a being of sense, belongs to the supersensible world.

In the book Occult Science, I have called the world that man learns to know by thus withdrawing his attention from the outer world and living within his own senses, the world of the Angeloi, the Beings who stand one stage higher than man. What is it that actually happens in our senses? We can fathom it if we are able to observe the inner activity of the senses while we are not actually perceiving with them. Just as we can remember an experience that took place years before, although it is no longer present, so, if we are able to observe the senses while they are not engaged in any act of perception, we can acquire knowledge of what happens there. It cannot be called remembrance, for that would convey a fallacious idea; nevertheless, in what we perceive we can at the same time perceive the processes that are engendered in the senses by the outer world through color, sound, smell, taste, touch, and so forth.

In this way we can penetrate into something of which man is otherwise unconscious, namely, the activity of his own senses while the outer world is transmitting its impressions to him. And here we become aware that the breathing process—the inbreathing of the air, the distribution of the air in the human organism, the outbreathing—works in a remarkable way through the whole organism. When we breathe in, the inhaled air passes into the very finest ramifications of the senses, and here the rhythmical breathing comes into contact with what is called in Spiritual Science, the astral body of man. What goes on in the senses depends upon the astral body coming into contact with the rhythmical breathing process. Thus when you hear a tone, it is because in your organ of hearing the astral body can come into contact with the vibrating air. It cannot do this in any other part of the human organism, but only in the senses. The senses are present in man in order that the astral body can contact what arises in the human body through the breath. And this happens not only in the organ of hearing but in every sense-organ; even in the sense of touch or feeling that extends over the whole organism the astral body actually comes in contact with the rhythmical breathing, that is to say, with the action of the air in our organism.

It is precisely when studying these things that we realize how necessary it is to keep in mind that man is not merely a solid structure, but almost 90% a column of water; as the air circulates all the time in the inner processes of his body, he is also an air-organism. And the air-organism, with its weaving life, comes into contact, in the sense-organs, with man's astral body. This takes place in very manifold ways in the sense-organs, but speaking generally it may be said that this meeting is the essential factor in all sensory processes.

To observe how an astral body comes into contact with the air is not possible unless we enter the Imaginative world. With Imaginative Cognition other conditions are perceived in the environment of the Earth where the astral forces come into contact with the air. But within us as human beings, what is of essential importance is that the astral body comes into contact with the breathing process and with what is actually sent by the breathing process through the bodily organism.

Thus we learn to know the weaving activity of the Beings belonging to the hierarchy of the Angeloi. The only true picture we can have of it is that in the unconscious process which takes its course in sense-perception, this world of supersensible Beings is working and weaving, passing in and out, as it were, through the doors of our senses. When we hear and when we see, this is a process that does not take place only through our arbitrary will, but belongs also to the objective world, operating in a sphere where we men are not even present, yet through which we are truly men, men endowed with senses.

You see, when our astral body between waking and falling asleep enters into relation in the sphere of our senses with the air that has now become rhythmical breathing and has therefore changed in character, we learn, so to say, to know the outermost periphery of man. But we learn to know still more of man if we can reach the higher stage of supersensible cognition called Inspiration in the books already mentioned.

At this point we must think of how man is subject to the alternating states of waking and sleeping life. Sense-perception too is subject to alternation. Perceptions would not have the right effect upon our consciousness if we were not able continually to interrupt the process involved. You know from purely external experiences that prolonged surrender to a sense-perception impairs consciousness of it. We must again and again withdraw from a given sense-impression, that is to say, we must alternate between the impression and a condition when we have no impression. For our consciousness to be normal as regards sense-impressions depends upon our being able also to withdraw the senses from the impression that is being made upon them; sense-perception must always be subject to these brief alternating conditions. These alternations also occur in longer periods of our life, for we alternate once in every twenty-four hours between waking and sleeping.

You are aware that when we pass over into the condition of sleep, our astral body and ego leave our physical and etheric bodies. Consequently between going to sleep and waking the astral body enters into relation with the outer world, whereas between waking and going to sleep it is related only to what goes on within the human body. Picture to yourselves these two states, or these two processes: the astral body between waking and going to sleep in connection with what occurs within the human physical and etheric bodies, and the astral body between going to sleep and waking in connection with the outer world, no longer with the physical and etheric bodies of man himself.

The spheres of the senses in us are already almost an outer world—if I may use an expression which, though paradoxical, you will understand. Think, for example, of the human eye. It is like an independent being—naturally I mean this only analogously—but it is truly like an independent being placed there in a cavity in the skull, then continuing further towards the interior with comparative independence. The eye itself, although permeated with life, is remarkably like a physical apparatus. The processes in the eye and the processes in a physical apparatus can be characterized in a remarkably similar way. The soul, it is true, comprises the processes arising in the eye, but, as I have often said, the sense-organs or the spheres of the senses are like gulfs which the outer world extends into us, as it were, and in the spheres of the senses we participate far more in the outer world than we do in the other domains of our organism.

When we turn our attention to some inner organ such as the kidneys, for example, we cannot say that there we share in something external by virtue of experiencing the processes of the organ itself. But in experiencing what goes on in the senses, we experience the outer world at the same time. I beg you to disregard entirely things that may be known to you from treatises on the physiology of the senses and so forth. I am not now referring to any of these things but to the fact that is perfectly accessible to ordinary human understanding, namely, that the process which takes place in the senses can more readily be grasped as something that extends into us from without and in which we participate, than as something we bring about inwardly through our organism. Hence it is also a fact that in the senses our astral body is practically in the outer world. Especially when we have deliberately surrendered ourselves to sense-perceptions of the outer world, our astral body is actually almost entirely submerged in the outer world, though not to the same extent in the case of all the senses. It is completely submerged in the outer world while we sleep. So that from this point of view sleep is a kind of enhancement of surrender of the senses to the outer world. When your eyes are closed, your astral body also withdraws more into the interior of the head; it belongs more to you yourself. When you look out in the normal way, then the astral body draws into the eye and participates in the outer world. If it passes entirely out of your organism, then you go to sleep. Surrender of the senses to the outer world is, in fact, not what is ordinarily supposed, but as regards consciousness is really a stage on the way to going to sleep.

Thus in acts of sense-perception man participates to some extent in the outer world; in sleep he participates in it fully. With Inspiration (knowledge through Inspiration) he can become aware of what is going on in the world in which he is with his astral body between sleeping and waking.

With Inspired Cognition, however, man can become aware of something else, namely the moment of waking. The moment of waking is as it were something that is more intense, more vivid, but may nevertheless be compared with closing the eyes.

When I am standing in front of a color, I surrender my astral body to that in the eye which, as I said, is nearly outside, namely, the process occasioned by a color from the external world making an impression upon my eye. When I close my eyes I draw my astral body back into myself; when I wake, I draw my astral body back from the outer world, from the Cosmos. Often, infinitely often during the waking life of day, in connection with the eyes or the ears, for example, I do the same with my astral body as I do on waking, only then my whole organism is involved as a totality. On waking I draw back my whole astral body. Naturally, this process of drawing back the astral body on waking remains unconscious in the ordinary way, just as the sense-process itself remains unconscious. But if this moment of waking becomes a conscious experience for one who has reached the stage of Inspiration, it is at once evident that this entrance of the astral body takes place in a quite different world from that in which we otherwise live; above all it is very often obvious how difficult it is for the astral body to come back again into the physical and etheric bodies. Hindrances are there.

It can truly be said that one who begins to be aware of this process of the return of the astral body into the physical and etheric bodies experiences spiritual storms and percussions. These spiritual storms show that the astral body is diving down into the physical and etheric bodies but these bodies are not like the descriptions given by anatomists and physiologists, for they too belong to a spiritual world. Both the so-called physical body and the somewhat nebulous etheric body are rooted in a spiritual world. In its real nature the physical body reveals itself as something quite different from the material image presented to the eye or to ordinary science.

This descent of the astral body into the physical and etheric bodies can appear in imagery of infinite variety. Let us say a burning piece of wood drops spluttering into water—that is the simplest, the most abstract analogy for the experience that may arise in one who is just beginning to have knowledge of this process. But then it becomes inwardly real in manifold ways, and is afterwards completely spiritualized inasmuch as what at first can only be compared in its appearance to a raging storm becomes permeated subsequently with harmonious movements, giving the impression that something is speaking, is saying or announcing something.

What is thus announced clothes itself to begin with in pictures of reminiscences from ordinary life; but this changes in course of time and we gradually come to experience a world that is also around us but in which our experiences cannot be called reminiscences of ordinary perceptions, because they are of an entirely different character and because they show us in themselves that this is a different world. It can be perceived that man with his astral body passes out of his environment into the physical and etheric bodies by way of the whole breathing process. The astral body that is active in the senses contacts the delicate ramifications of the breathing process and penetrates into the subtle rhythms in which the breathing process reaches into the sphere of the senses. At the moment of waking the astral body leaves the outer world, enters into the physical and etheric bodies and seizes hold of the breathing process which has been left to itself during the period of sleep. Along the paths of the breathing processes, of the moving breath, the astral body enters into the physical and etheric bodies and spreads out as does the breath itself.

At the moment of waking, ordinary consciousness swiftly obtrudes itself into the perception of the outer world, and quickly unites experience of the breathing process with experience of the organism as a whole. Consciousness at the stage of Inspiration can separate this flow of the astral body along the paths of the breathing rhythm and become aware of the rest of the organic process—although naturally the latter does not take its course on its own. Not only at this moment of waking, but at every moment the movement of the breath in the human organism is of course connected inwardly with the other processes in the organism. But in the higher consciousness of Inspiration the two can be separated. We follow how the astral body, moving along the paths of the rhythmical breathing, enters into the physical body, and then we learn to know something that otherwise remains completely unconscious.

After having experienced all the states of consciousness which accompany this entrance of the astral body and are objective—not subjective—states of feeling, the knowledge comes to us that man, inasmuch as he is not merely a being of sense but also a being of breath, has his roots in the world I have called in Occult Science the world of the Archangeloi. Just as the Beings of the supersensible world standing one stage above man are active in his sense-processes, so are the Beings of the spiritual world standing two stages above him active in his breathing process. They pass in and out, as it were, as he goes to sleep and wakes.

Something of great significance for human life presents itself to us when we observe these processes. If our waking life was not interrupted by sleep, although impressions of the outer world would come to us, these impressions would last only for a short time. We could not develop a lasting power of memory. You know how fleetingly the pictures work in the senses as after-images. Processes activated more deeply in the organism continue to work for a longer time; but the after-effects would not continue for more than a few days if we did not sleep.

What is it that actually goes on in sleep? Here I must remind you of something I said here very recently, describing how during sleep, with his astral body and his ego, man always lives through in backward order what he has experienced in the physical world in the preceding waking period. Let us take a regular waking period and a regular sleeping period—it is however just the same for irregular periods. A man wakes up on a certain morning, busies himself during the day, goes to rest in the evening and sleeps through the night for about a third of the time he has been awake. Between waking and going to sleep he has a series of experiences, daytime experiences. During sleep he actually lives through in backward order what had been experienced during the day. The life of sleep goes backward with greater rapidity, so that only a third of the time is needed.

What has actually happened? If we were to sleep according to the laws of the physical world—I do not now mean the body, for the body sleeps according to those laws as a matter of course—but if in the conditions of existence outside the physical and etheric bodies, in our ego and our astral body, our sleep were governed by the same laws which govern our waking life by day, this movement backwards would not be possible, for we should simply have to go forward with the flow of time. We are subject to altogether different laws when in our astral body and ego we are outside the physical and etheric bodies.

Now think of the following. Today is the 22nd December; this morning was for you, when you woke from sleep, the morning of the 22nd December. Presently you will go to sleep and by the time you wake tomorrow, your experiences in their backward order, will have brought you again to the morning of today, the 22nd December. So you have gone through an inner process in which you have turned back. When you wake tomorrow, the morning of 23rd December, the process will have carried you back to the morning of the 22nd December. You wake up; at the same moment—because now your astral body, contrary to the laws it has been obeying during your sleep, makes the jerk through your body into the ordinary physical world—at the same moment you are compelled in your inmost soul-life to go forward quickly with your ego and astral body to the morning of the 23rd December. You actually pass through this process inwardly.

I want you to grasp in its full significance what I am now going to say. If you have some kind of gas in a closed vessel, you can compress this gas so that it becomes denser. That is a process in Space. But it can be compared—naturally only compared—with what I have just been describing to you. You go back in your astral body and your ego to the morning of December 22nd, and then, when you next wake, you jerk quickly forward to the morning of December 23rd. You impel your soul forward in Time. And through this process your soul-being, your astral body, becomes so condensed within Time, that it carries the impressions of the outer world not only for a short period, but as enduring memory. Just as any gas that is condensed exercises a stronger pressure, has more inner power, so does your astral body acquire the strong power of remembrance, of memory, through this inner condensation in Time.

This gives us an idea of something that otherwise always escapes our consciousness. We are apt to conceive that Time flows on evenly, and that everything taking place in Time also flows on evenly with it. As regards Space we know that whatever is extended in Space can be condensed; its inner power of expansion increases. But what lives in Time, the element of soul, can be condensed too—I am speaking figuratively, of course—and then its inner power increases. And for man, one of these powers is the power of memory.

We actually owe this power of remembrance, of memory, to what happens during our sleep. From the time of going to sleep until waking we are in the world of the Archangeloi, and together with the Beings of that hierarchy we cultivate this power of memory. Just as we cultivate the power of sense-perception and the combining of sense-perceptions together with the Beings of the hierarchy of the Angeloi, so do we cultivate this power of memory, which is a more in ward power, more connected with the centre of our being, in communion with the world of the Archangeloi.

True knowledge of man does not exist in a nebulous, mystic form of brooding introspection; true knowledge of man, with every further step that is taken into the inner life, leads at the same time into higher worlds. We have spoken today of two such steps. If we contemplate the sphere of the senses we are in the sphere of the Angeloi; if we contemplate the sphere of memory, we are in the sphere of the Archangloi. Self-knowledge is at the same time knowledge of the Gods, knowledge of Spirit, because every step that leads into man's inner being leads ipso facto into the spiritual world. And the deeper the penetration within, the higher—to use a paradox—is the ascent into the world of spiritual Beings. Self-knowledge, if it is earnest, is true World-knowledge, namely, knowledge of the spiritual content of the World.

From what has been said you can understand why in ancient times, when certain oriental peoples were striving to acquire an instinctive kind of spiritual vision, the aim was to make the breathing process into a conscious process by means of special breathing exercises. In point of fact, as soon as the breathing process becomes a conscious process, we enter into a spiritual world.

I need not say again today that those ancient practices should not be repeated by modern man with his different constitution, but should be replaced by others which are set forth in the books mentioned. It can however be said with truth in the case of both kinds of knowledge, the knowledge based upon the old, mystical clairvoyance and the knowledge yielded by the exact clairvoyance proper to the modern age, that genuine observation of the processes which take place inwardly in man leads at the same time into the spiritual world.

There are people who say: All this is unspiritual, for the aim is to investigate the senses, the breathing. They call it materialistic self-knowledge in comparison with nebulous mystical experience. But let them try to practice it for once! They will soon discover that genuine knowledge of the sense-process reveals it to be a spiritual process and that to regard it as a material process is sheer illusion. And the same applies to the breathing process. The breathing process is a material process only when seen externally. Seen from within, it is through and through a spiritual process, actually taking its course in a world far higher than the world we perceive through our senses.